STAT+: Pharmalittle: Roche data on immunotherapy accidentally released; Novo Nordisk hires Thermo Fisher to manufacture Wegovy
Novo Nordisk has hired Thermo Fisher as its second contract manufacturer for its popular weight-loss drug Wegovy,
Hello and happy Wednesday from STAT’s London outpost, with Andrew Joseph here filling in for Ed. While you fire up the coffee pot, we’re doing a bit of post-lunch cleanup, but still of course have time to offer you the latest in pharma headlines.
In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the multibillion-dollar hunt for what many drugmakers hope will be the next big immunotherapy target had its latest twist, STAT details. Roche confirmed the accidental release of interim data from a clinical trial testing whether blocking that target — a protein on T cells known as TIGIT — can enable non-small lung cancer patients to live longer than standard immunotherapy alone. The data are from February and remain far from conclusive, but they showed that patients on the combination of Tecentriq and an anti-TIGIT antibody had a median survival of 22.9 months, compared to 16.7 months on Tecentriq alone.
Novo Nordisk has hired Thermo Fisher as its second contract manufacturer for its popular weight-loss drug Wegovy, Reuters reports, citing a source familiar with the matter. Thermo is doing the filling of the Wegovy injection pens at its factory in Greenville, N.C., the source said. The company had previously said it had enlisted a second contract manufacturer, but had not identified it. The Danish drugmaker is scrambling to boost output of the drug to meet soaring demand in the United States and after production problems at the factory in Belgium operated by its first contract manufacturer, Catalent.
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