Onco Actu du 7 janvier 2019

	2. ETIOLOGIE
The Sartan Contamination Story [In the Pipeline] The FDA’s standard is to be below an amount that would be expected (by their dose/response modeling) to cause 1 extra cancer case in 100,000 people who were taking the tablets at a standard dose for 70 straight years. That’s pretty stringent, considering the background rates of cancer in people who actually stay alive for 70 years in a row, especially when you factor in that no one goes on valsartan when they’re ten years old.
	3. PRÉVENTION
Laws Intended To Protect Firefighters Who Get Cancer Often Lack Teeth [NPR] The correlation between firefighters' on-the-job exposure to carcinogens and their subsequent illnesses is concerning enough to policy makers that a growing number of states have passed laws — 42 states and Washington, D.C. — designed to help firefighters who develop cancer, according to the non-profit Firefighter Cancer Support Network.
	3.1 PRÉVENTION - TABAC
All smokers admitted to hospital to be offered help to quit by NHS [The Guardian] Health service in England will support at least 600,000 people over five years.
	3.1.1 PRÉVENTION - TABAC - E-CIGS
Vaping by young people remains a burning issue among health experts [The Guardian] Despite much debate in UK and US there is still little agreement over how safe e-cigarettes are.
F.D.A. Accuses Juul and Altria of Backing Off Plan to Stop Youth Vaping [NY Times] “Juul and Altria made very specific assertions in their letters and statements to the F.D.A. about the drivers of the youth epidemic,” Dr. Gottlieb said in an interview. “Their recent actions and statements appear to be inconsistent with those commitments.”
	4.12 BIOPSIES LIQUIDES
The Race to Diagnose Cancer With a Simple Blood Test [Ron Winslow - Medium] While he commends the efforts to create such a test, Maitra, the MD Anderson pathologist, says that of the various possible uses for liquid biopsies, early detection “is on the shakiest ground.”
	4.2 DÉP., DIAG. & PRONO. - GÉNOME
2019 Sequencing Tech Speculations, Part I: Illumina & MGI [Omics! Omics!] For both Illumina with the PacBio technology and Oxford Nanopore, there is a question of when long read assays will move from purely research to regular clinical practice.
	5. TRAITEMENTS
Sex differences identified in deadly brain tumors [WUSTL] “We observed tremendous genetic sex differences in the tumors of glioblastoma patients that correlated with survival,” Luo said. “All evidence supports the need to define these distinctions and incorporate the sex differences into glioblastoma biology research and treatment.”
Experts Forecast Cancer Research and Treatment Advances in 2019 [Cancer Research Catalyst] We asked Nobel Laureate, Fellow of the AACR Academy, and immunotherapy pioneer James P. Allison, PhD; AACR President-elect and precision medicine expert Elaine Mardis, PhD; and chairperson for the Minorities in Cancer Research Council of the AACR, Brian Rivers, PhD; to share their insights on progress expected in 2019 in the oncology field.
	5.12.1 IMMUNOTHÉRAPIES - PARTENARIATS
AbbVie puts up $105M for Tizona's preclinical I/O drug [BiopharmaDive] An enzyme, CD39 works to begin conversion of an immune stimulatory signal to an immune suppressive one within the tumor microenvironment. AbbVie and Tizona believe inhibiting CD39 could help restore and strengthen immune response against tumors that have co-opted the body's normal response.
Takeda takes another step into cell therapy research [BiopharmaDive] In a new deal, Takeda will work with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to develop CAR-T products for the treatment of multiple myeloma, acute myeloid leukemia and solid tumors.
Sanofi and Regeneron Restructure Immuno-Oncology Collaboration for Discovery and Development Programs [Sanofi] - Companies select two clinical-stage bispecific antibodies for ongoing collaboration - Sanofi able to independently pursue own immuno-oncology programs; Regeneron retains full rights to all its other investigational immunooncology programs.
AbbVie and Tizona Therapeutics Announce Strategic Collaboration to Develop First-in-Class Immunotherapy for Cancer Targeting CD39 [AbbVie] The ATP-adenosine axis has recently emerged as a key immune regulatory switch in the tumor microenvironment (TME) by controlling the inflammatory and suppressive activities of immune cells. CD39 is the enzyme responsible for the initial steps in the conversion of immune stimulatory extracellular ATP to immune suppressive adenosine in the TME. Inhibition of CD39 with TTX-030 represents a novel and differentiated approach to targeting this pathway.
Sanofi sharpens focus on mRNA for cancer with equity investment in Germany’s BioNTech [EndPoints] BioNTech said one of those candidates will enter the clinic and the two partners will co-develop the drug in patients with multiple solid tumors. The unspecified experimental therapy is designed to be injected directly into the tumor, subverting the toxicity associated with systemic administration.
Sanofi invests €80M in BioNTech as cancer mRNA hits clinic [FierceBiotech] When injected into tumors, synthetic mRNAs can induce the production of immunomodulatory molecules that induce immunity to tumor-specific antigens. Sanofi and BioNTech think the approach avoids the anti-vector immunity and expression in distant tissue that can affect viral gene therapies and oncolytic viruses.
	5.12.2 IMMUNOTHÉRAPIES - CAR-T, THÉRAPIES CELLULAIRES
A New Age For Neoantigens [Genentech] “The cell-based approach — what we’re calling neoantigen directed T-cell therapies — builds perfectly on what we’re doing with cancer immunotherapy. But instead of training the immune system, we’re synthetically rewiring it by engineering a person’s own T-cells with receptors that recognize their cancer’s neoantigens,” says Mellman.
Adaptive Biotechnologies to Enter Into Worldwide Collaboration and License Agreement with Genentech to Develop Personalized Cellular Therapies for the Treatment of Cancer [Adaptive Biotechnologies] Adaptive’s TruTCR screening platform enables the discovery of TCRs against any type of clinically relevant antigen at high throughput. The platform can be used to identify antigens that are shared among patients as well as those that are specific to individual patients.
	5.2 PHARMA
A biotech startup breaks a 3-year silence, displaying a $65M raise and a next-gen approach to PARP [EndPoints] Those pioneering PARPs on the market target PARP1, but that’s just one of a broad family of 17 enzymes. Ribon’s lead program goes after PARP7, a different protein and a different target in this world, similarly activated by stress and cellular response mechanisms.
Scoop: MedImmune chief Bahija Jallal is leaving AstraZeneca and joining the trek into biotech [EndPoints] Jallal says she feels like “a kid in a candy store” when it comes to Immunocore, a company with a broad platform that is built to accommodate oncology as well as infectious diseases and autoimmune conditions.
	5.2.1 PHARMA - PARTENARIATS
Ribon Therapeutics gains Novartis, J&J backing for monoPARP work [FierceBiotech] Ribon has built up a tech platform to “interrogate monoPARPs” with an eye to developing first-in-class, small molecule therapeutics.
Mersana Therapeutics Announces Strategic Priorities and Goals for 2019 and Beyond [Mersana] "We have decided to focus our resources on advancing XMT-1536, our first-in-class ADC candidate targeting NaPi2b, a clinically validated ADC target broadly expressed in ovarian and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) adenocarcinoma, for which there remains a significant unmet medical need.”
Deserted by Takeda, Mersana abandons lead drug [EndPoints] While existing ADCs can be limited to just a few therapies, Mersana’s tech platform is designed to produce drugs that can link up with 12 to 15, in theory vastly enhancing the therapeutic potential of their crop of ADCs for diseases previously out of reach.
	5.2.2 PHARMA - FUSIONS & ACQUISITIONS
Could Gilead, Amgen and AbbVie follow Bristol-Myers into megadeal territory? [Xconomy] A couple other big players belong on the M&A watch list, starting with Gilead. The Big Biotech has already attempted to mitigate its hepatitis C sales slide with one mammoth deal—its $12 billion pick-up of Kite—but with Kite’s CAR-T sales off to a slow start, it could use another, analysts contend. And they say companies like Clovis Oncology, which is struggling to keep its PARP inhibitor Rubraca competitive against rivals with more marketing muscle, could make a good target.
How Bristol-Myers' big buy could spur ripples for pharma M&A [BiopharmaDive] Outside of large deals, analysts expect Celgene's takeover to send some ripples through the small- to mid-cap dealmaking landscape because of the biotech's propensity for partnering.
	5.2.3 PHARMA - ÉCONOMIE
Remember that mega-blockbuster valuation AbbVie assigned to Rova-T? It’s starting to vanish — quietly [EndPoints] Observers never did believe the drug warranted a fat $5.8 billion cash advance in the Stemcentrx acquisition, with $4 billion in milestones. By the time the company halted the late-stage TAHOE study a month ago after determining the drug arm had a shorter survival rate than the control arm, analysts prepped last rites for the drug.
Abbvie to record $4 billion impairment charges on Stemcentrx assets [Reuters] Abbvie Inc on Friday said it will record an estimated $4 billion in impairment charges related to the scrapping of its development program of Rova-T, an investigational cancer therapy.
	6.10 POLITIQUES
UK universities warn ‘no deal’ Brexit will hit crucial funding streams [Nature] Institution leaders urge government to guarantee lost research grants from valuable European Union programmes.
	6.6 PUBLICATIONS
Will the world embrace Plan S, the radical proposal to mandate open access to science papers? [Science] Many await the European Commission's policy: Although its grants represent a small percentage of research funding in Europe, its OA rules can influence national mandates.
	6.7.1 IA/BIOINFORMATIQUE
Data Scientist Explains How AI's Seductive Power Can Mislead Biomarker Researchers [Forbes] Stated more directly – the vast majority of the “signatures” demonstrated by these approaches are likely to be false positives.