Phar­ma has much to learn from the sur­pris­ing boom of tele­health sales of obe­si­ty drugs, No­vo Nordisk's CEO Mike Doust­dar said at the End­points at #JPM26 event on the side­lines of the an­nu­al JP Mor­gan Health­care Con­fer­ence on Mon­day.

Sales of obe­si­ty drugs have ex­plod­ed over the past few years. Many tele­health com­pa­nies be­gan sell­ing com­pound­ed ver­sions of the drugs for a cheap­er price, es­pe­cial­ly while obe­si­ty med­ica­tions were in short­age. In re­sponse to con­sumer in­ter­est in cash prices for the GLP-1 med­ica­tions, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies launched plat­forms to sell their own med­ica­tions di­rect­ly to cus­tomers both on­line and through tra­di­tion­al phar­ma­cies.

Sci­en­tists at Base­camp Re­search say they have used “evo­lu­tion­ary AI mod­els,” de­vel­oped with help from chip­mak­er Nvidia, to cre­ate a pow­er­ful new gene edit­ing tool that can in­sert a new healthy gene in front of an old bro­ken one.

The start­up is fo­cused on en­zymes known as large ser­ine re­com­bi­nas­es, which are vi­ral en­zymes that in­sert genes in­to bac­te­r­i­al genomes. Get­ting them to work on hu­man DNA has been in­cred­i­bly dif­fi­cult. But us­ing its AI mod­els, Base­camp gen­er­at­ed be­spoke en­zymes that tar­get­ed 10 hu­man genes re­spon­si­ble for dis­eases in­clud­ing Duchenne mus­cu­lar dy­s­tro­phy and he­mo­phil­ia B.

Those ex­per­i­ments, re­vealed Mon­day in an on­line preprint, were large­ly done in test tubes. The com­pa­ny has al­so used the ap­proach to make CAR-T cells. But if the new edit­ing ap­proach works in peo­ple, it could be the long-sought so­lu­tion for in­sert­ing large pieces of DNA at pre­cise spots in the genome.

The FDA on Mon­day lift­ed a par­tial clin­i­cal hold on a Phase 3 lung can­cer study run by Mer­ck and Dai­ichi Sankyo.

Reg­u­la­tors had placed the hold just last month af­ter see­ing a “high­er than an­tic­i­pat­ed in­ci­dence” of deaths from in­ter­sti­tial lung dis­ease. To rec­ti­fy things, Mer­ck and Dai­ichi Sankyo took a num­ber of steps — up­dat­ing their tri­al’s ex­clu­sion cri­te­ria, more fre­quent­ly re­view­ing un­blind­ed datasets, and up­dat­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tor train­ing, a Dai­ichi spokesper­son told End­points.

“Once train­ing is com­plete, en­roll­ment of new pa­tients in­to the tri­al will re­sume,” the spokesper­son said.

The study in ques­tion, IDeate-Lung02, is ex­am­in­ing a pro­gram known as ifi­natam­ab derux­te­can, or I-DXd, in re­lapsed small cell lung can­cer. I-DXd is a B7-H3 an­ti­body-drug con­ju­gate that’s part of Mer­ck and Dai­ichi’s $4 bil­lion deal, which was signed in 2023.