Development of a new cancer treatment pioneered by Roche was thrown into doubt on May 11 when the immunotherapy drug failed to slow progression of lung cancer in a second trial, hitting the Swiss pharmaceutical maker’s shares.

A collaboration between Gilead Sciences and Dragonfly Therapeutics was announced May 2, with an end goal of bringing Dragonfly’s DF7001 natural killer (NK) engager program designed for patients with cancer or inflammatory diseases to fruition. 

Gilead Sciences Inc. announced that first-quarter 2022 revenue rose 3 percent, helped by sales of the HIV drug Biktarvy and the COVID antiviral Veklury, but reported a net loss as the biotech company wrote down the value of its 2020 acquisition of Immunomedics following recent trial results for the cancer medicine Trodelvy.

Johnson & Johnson filed a lawsuit against drug distributors and a pharmacy seeking to stop the sale of counterfeit versions of the company’s HIV drugs, months after a similar case brought by Gilead Sciences Inc.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration is aiming to expand access to COVID-19 oral antiviral treatments like Pfizer Inc.’s Paxlovid by doubling the number of locations at which they are available, the White House said on April 26.

Gilead

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Gilead Sciences’ antiviral therapy Veklury (remdesivir) as the first treatment for COVID-19 in young children.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee is holding a meeting on April 21, 2022, to discuss safety findings across the entire class of PI3K inhibitors for hematological cancers.

Gilead

Gilead Sciences scored a legal victory regarding fraudulent HIV reimbursements.

An experimental drug being developed by RedHill Biopharma Ltd. that improved outcomes in a randomized trial involving severely ill COVID-19 patients infected with earlier versions of the coronavirus is showing promise against the Omicron variant in test tube experiments, researchers said. Additionally, people living with well-controlled HIV infections are likely to have immune responses to the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and from Pfizer/BioNTech similar to those of otherwise healthy individuals, according to new data.

Gilead Sciences Inc. said on April 11 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had lifted the partial clinical hold placed on the company’s trials testing a blood cancer drug combination.