Last week, Almirall signed an agreement with WuXi Biologics to collaborate on multiple bispecific antibodies targeting dermatology conditions, including atopic dermatitis. Almirall’s press release indicated that, “[u]nder the terms of the agreement, Almirall has access to WuXi Biologics’ proprietary antibody platforms including WuXiBody™ to discover multiple novel bispecific antibodies.” This…
Today, the World Health Organization (“WHO”) prequalified Samsung Bioepis’s breast cancer biosimilar trastuzumab – WHO’s first biosimilar prequalification. Prequalification is “a service provided by WHO to assess the quality, safety and efficacy of those products that address global public health priorities.” The WHO noted that the global average price of…
As previously reported, earlier this year Fresenius filed a petition for inter partes review of claims 9-10, 13-21 and 23-30 of Amgen’s pegfilgrastim patent – U.S. Patent No. 9,643,997 (“997 patent”). The challenged claims of the ’997 patent relate to methods for purifying proteins of interest expressed in a non-native…
Samsung Bioepis Co., Ltd announced today that the FDA has accepted for review an aBLA for SB8, a bevacizumab biosimilar to Roche’s Avastin® product. If approved, SB8 will be commercialized in the US by Merck & Co.
On November 15, the FDA approved Pfizer’s Humira® biosimilar, ABRILADA (adalimumab-afzb). The acting director of the Office of Therapeutic Biologics and Biosimilars in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Sarah Yim, M.D., announced the approval as one of nine new biosimilar products the FDA “has taken action on…
This month, the Star Ratings for Biosimilars Act was introduced in the House. H.R. 4629 is a bipartisan bill that requires the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to evaluate Medicare Advantage (MA) plans based on whether biosimilars are available to enrollees, and adds “a new set of…
Below are some recent highlights of biosimilar news: On August 20th, two companies announced that they had launched competing biosimilars of Eli Lilly’s FORSTEO (teriparatide) in Europe. First, Gedeon Richter announced that it launched TERROSA in Europe after it received approval from the European Commission. According to the announcement, the…
As we previously reported, the parties in the follow-on Amgen v. Apotex BPCIA litigation concerning Apotex’s proposed biosimilars of NEUPOGEN (filgrastim) and NEULASTA (pegfilgrastim) informed the district court on August 8 that they were drafting a stipulation and unopposed motion that would substitute Apotex as a party with a then-unnamed…
Last week, Big Molecule Watch sat down with Professor Arti Rai to discuss an article she recently co-authored, “How logically impossible patents block biosimilars.” The article, published earlier this month in the journal Nature Biotechnology, examines the differences between the patent and drug approval legal and regulatory regimes and how…
Below are some highlights of recent news in biosimilar and follow-on biologic development: Prestige BioPharma On July 2, Prestige BioPharma (Prestige) licensed the rights to Tuznue, its trastuzumab biosimilar of Roche’s Herceptin, to Mundipharma in selected European markets. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) recently accepted a Marketing Authorisation Application for…