21 December 2017

FDA approves Spark Therapeutics’ retinal disease gene therapy Luxturna, a month ahead of schedule

By |2018-09-12T21:33:46+00:00December 21, 2017|Drug Development, Eye Diseases, Gene Therapy, Haberman Associates, Personalized Medicine, Rare Diseases, Recent News|

Interface of retinal pigment epithelium and photoreceptor cells. Source: NIH Open-i

 

As we discussed in our December 17, 2015 article on this blog, Spark Therapeutics’ (Philadelphia, PA) SPK-RPE65 had achieved positive Phase 3 results at that time. It was expected to reach the U.S. market in 2017.

As announced by Spark in a press release, SPK-RPE65, now known as Luxturna (voretigene neparvovec-rzyl), was approved by the FDA on Dec. 19, 2017. This was ahead of the FDA’s PDUFA date for the therapy (i.e., the deadline for action by the FDA) in mid-January 2018.

Luxturna is a one-time gene therapy designed to treat patients with an inherited retinal disease (IRD) caused by mutations in both copies of the RPE65 (retinal pigment epithelium-specific 65 kDa protein) gene who have sufficient viable retinal cells as determined by their treating physicians. Luxturna consists of a version of the human RPE65 gene delivered via an adeno-associated virus 2 (AAV2) viral vector. It is administered via subretinal injection.

As outlined in the Spark December 19, 2017 press release, Luxturna is first FDA-approved gene therapy for a genetic disease, the first FDA-approved pharmacologic treatment for an inherited retinal disease (IRD), and first adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector gene therapy approved in the United States. However, two gene therapies, uniQure/Chiesi’s Glybera (alipogene tiparvovec) (an expensive money-losing therapy that has only been used once) and GlaxoSmithKline’s Strimvelis, were approved in Europe prior to the FDA approval of Luxturna. Moreover, the CAR-T (chimeric antigen receptor  T-cell) cellular immunotherapies Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) (Novartis) and Yescarta (axicabtagene ciloleucel) (Gilead/Kite), which are ex vivo gene therapies, were approved in 2017—prior to the approval of Luxturna. Thus although Luxturna is a pioneering gene therapy that represents a number of “firsts”, it is only one of several of the first gene therapies that have reached regulatory approval in recent years.

Pricing and patient access issues with Luxturna

On January 3, 2018, Spark announced that it has set an $850,000 wholesale acquisition cost for Luxturna — $425,000 per eye affected by an RPE65 gene mutation. This makes Luxturna—which is intended as a one-time treatment—the highest priced therapy in the U.S. to date. Some 2,000 patients (fewer than 20 new patients per year) may be eligible for treatment with Luxturna, provided that Spark can persuade payers to cover the treatment.

Also on January 3, 2018, Spark announced a set of three payer programs designed to enable patient access to treatment with Luxturna. These include “an outcomes-based rebate arrangement with a long-term durability measure, an innovative contracting model and a proposal to CMS [The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] under which payments for Luxturna would be made over time.” Spark has reached agreement in principle with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care to make Luxturna available under the outcomes-based rebate program, and under the contracting model that is designed to reduce risk and financial burden for payers and treatment centers. Spark has also reached an agreement in principle with affiliates of Express Scripts to adopt the innovative contracting model.

Spark’s proposal to CMS is based on enabling the company to offer payers the option to spread payment over multiple years, as well as greater rebates tied to clinical outcomes.

As pointed out by John Carroll of Endpoints News, pricing and payer programs that become established for Luxturna may have a wide impact on the whole gene therapy field, in particular gene therapies for hemophilia. As we discussed in our February 2, 2016 blog article, several companies—including Spark—are developing one-time gene therapies for hemophilias A and B. Hemophilia could prove to be the most competitive area of gene therapy in the near future.

Our gene therapy report

Our book-length report, Gene Therapy: Moving Toward Commercialization, contains extensive information on the development of improved gene therapy vectors (especially including AAV vectors). It also contains detailed information on SPK-RPE65/Luxturna and its mechanism of action, as well as on other gene therapies in clinical development (such as those for hemophilia). In addition, it contains information on leading gene therapy companies including Spark. It is an invaluable resource for understanding clinical development of gene therapies, and the academic groups and companies that are carrying out this development.

To order our report, Gene Therapy: Moving Toward Commercialization, please go to the Insight Pharma Reports website.

As the producers of this blog, and as consultants to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry, Haberman Associates would like to hear from you. If you are in a biotech or pharmaceutical company, and would like a 15-20-minute, no-obligation telephone discussion of issues raised by this or other blog articles, or of other issues that are important to your company, please contact us by phone or e-mail. We also welcome your comments on this or any other article on this blog.

7 December 2017

”Improving Candidate Selection: Translating Molecules into Medicines.”

By |2018-12-28T23:31:34+00:00December 7, 2017|Cancer, Drug Development, Drug Discovery, Gene Therapy, Haberman Associates, Immunology, Monoclonal Antibodies, Oligonucleotide Therapeutics, Recent News, RNAi, Strategy and Consulting|

Bromodomain. A chromatin “reader” that is a target of PPI drug development. Source: WillowW at the English language Wikipedia.

 

Allan B. Haberman, Ph.D. was one of about 25 experts from pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and consulting firms who attended Aptuit’s  one-day think-tank event, ”Improving Candidate Selection: Translating Molecules into Medicines”. This was the third and final such networking and discussion symposium, which was held in downtown Boston, on December 4, 2017. The previous two events in this series had been held in San Francisco (18th & 19th Sept 2017) and in Hertfordshire, UK (22nd & 23rd Oct 2017). The Boston discussion session was preceded by a relaxed networking dinner on the evening of the 3rd.

Attendees and presenters at the Boston meeting were from Shire, Celgene, Forma Therapeutics, Roche, Amgen, Novartis, the Broad Institute, Warp Drive Bio, Mass General Hospital, EnBiotix, Yumanity, and Ra Pharma—among others—as well as from Aptuit and its parent company Evotec.

The focus of the meeting was on improving drug candidate selection in order to improve development success. Only about 10% of drug candidates make their way from first-in-humans trials to regulatory approval. The greatest amount of attrition occurs in Phase 2. Approximately half of candidates fail at that stage, mainly due to lack of efficacy.

One of the key issues discussed in the symposium was the role of the Lipinski Rule of Five—a set of physico-chemical properties that determine the “drug-likeness” of a clinical candidate; i.e., whether a compound is likely to be an orally active drug in humans. Some participants stated that these guidelines had been interpreted too rigidly, and have excluded many potentially good drugs from further development. They stated that the Lipinski rules are only guidelines, and do not replace thinking. (For a similar point of view, see Paul Leeson’s 2012 News and Views article in Nature.) For example, researchers should measure physical properties empirically, rather than inferring them.

The Lipinski rules also exclude whole classes of drug candidates—such as natural products and macrocyclic compounds—from consideration. Before the era of combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening, natural products were the mainstay of drug discovery and development.

The Haberman Associates website contains reports, articles, and links to reports that are useful in understanding the issues discussed in the Aptuit symposia. Links to most of these publications can be found on our Publications page. Notably, there is a 2009 report entitled Approaches to Reducing Phase II Attrition, which is available from Insight Pharma Reports. There is also a 2009 article (available on our website at no cost) based on that report, entitled “Overcoming Phase II Attrition Problem.”

Drug attrition numbers have not changed since our 2009 publications. However even back in 2009, pharmaceutical company researchers attributed high attrition rates due to lack of efficacy to companies’ addressing more complex diseases, with the need to discover and develop drugs that have novel mechanisms of action and/or address unprecedented targets. At the December 4 Aptiut symposium, participants similarly attributed high attrition rates to researchers’ tackling new classes of drugs. These included drug classes whose development involves working with premature technologies—e.g., protein-protein interactions (PPIs), gene therapy, RNAi, CAR-T therapies, cancer vaccines, , and combination immuno-oncology therapies.

Working on development of drugs based on premature technologies involves development of enabling technologies that will allow researchers to “move up the technology development curve” and thus to achieve increasing success in drug development. R&D in some of these fields—notably development of checkpoint inhibitors for use in immuno-oncology—has been moving up the technology curve, resulting in notable successes.

Although attrition rates have not changed since 2009, drug developers have been working with increasingly newer classes of drugs. Attrition thus continues to be a moving target.

Among the publications available on our website is our 2012 report—Advances in the Discovery of Protein-Protein Interaction Modulators. As the result of corporate restructuring, this report has not be available anywhere in recent years. However, with the permission of the publisher, Datamonitor Healthcare (a division of Informa), we are now hosting it on our website.

Aptuit’s “Translating molecules into medicines” symposia and improving drug discovery and development

The purpose of Aptuit’s symposia was “to discuss and learn from the experiences of those involved in working at the interface of discovery and development. These meetings were designed to give attendees the chance to build meaningful relationships, challenge their understanding of certain subjects and learn from leading members of their peer group in a non-commercialized setting.”

The organizers of the symposia ask whether “having the flexibility to think beyond established rules and adopting more collaborative development strategies will be just as important as the innovative science and technologies for drug discovery and development.” We at Haberman Associates look forward to assisting you in your efforts to move your drug discovery and development programs forward.

As the producers of this blog, and as consultants to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry, Haberman Associates would like to hear from you. If you are in a biotech or pharmaceutical company, and would like a 15-20-minute, no-obligation telephone discussion of issues raised by this or other blog articles, or of other issues that are important to your company, please contact us by phone or e-mail. We also welcome your comments on this or any other article on this blog.

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