Enzyvant: FDA Acceptance of Biologics License Application

Enzyvant Announces FDA Acceptance of Biologics License Application (BLA) and Priority Review Status for RVT-802, a Novel Investigational Tissue-Based Regenerative Therapy for Pediatric Congenital Athymia

RVT-802, a one-time therapy, leverages Enzyvant’s T cell generation platform designed to treat profound immunodeficiencies

Left untreated, congenital athymia is uniformly fatal, with death typically occurring in first 24 months of life

Company to present at Roivant Pipeline Day in New York City on June 6, 2019

enzyvant logo

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. & BASEL, Switzerland–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Enzyvant, a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing transformative therapies for patients with rare, often fatal conditions, today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted for filing its Biologics License Application (BLA) for RVT-802, a novel investigational tissue-based regenerative therapy designed to treat pediatric congenital athymia, and granted Priority Review. Congenital athymia is a rare and deadly condition associated with complete DiGeorge Anomaly (cDGA), CHARGE syndrome, and FOXN1 deficiency. At this time, the FDA is not planning to hold an Advisory Committee meeting to discuss the application, and Enzyvant anticipates a regulatory decision in December 2019.

“We look forward to the potential of RVT-802 becoming available as an approved regenerative medicine to all families and patients who could benefit from it.”

Children with congenital athymia are born without a thymus, resulting in a severe immunodeficiency due to the inability to produce normally functioning T cells, which defend against infection and regulate essential processes in the immune system. Approximately 20 infants are born each year in the United States with congenital athymia, which is fatal if untreated. Death typically occurs in the first 24 months of life due to susceptibility to infection. Currently, there are no FDA-approved therapies for this condition. RVT-802 stimulates and facilitates the body’s production of naive, immunocompetent T cells, with the goal of bolstering the immune system and restoring the body’s ability to fight infection. Investigational RVT-802 is designed to be administered as a single treatment.

“We are proud to be advancing RVT-802, a regenerative therapy that embodies bold, transformative science. The intense urgency to treat infants and young children who would otherwise succumb to congenital athymia drew us to forge a partnership with Duke University and continues to motivate us to advance toward a potential approval with focus and speed,” said Rachelle Jacques, Chief Executive Officer of Enzyvant. “The long-term data for RVT-802 as a one-time treatment reinforces the potentially life-saving value and durable impact of this therapy. We are committed to working collaboratively with payers to establish a value-based reimbursement model that accelerates access for patients.”

The BLA filing for RVT-802 included clinical data that demonstrated long-term durability of treatment with RVT-802. At the time of the BLA filing, a total of 93 patients received RVT-802 across multiple clinical studies, including 85 patients who met the criteria for inclusion in the efficacy analysis. The Kaplan-Meier estimates of survival [95% confidence interval] at year one and year two post treatment were 76% [66 – 84] and 75% [66 – 83], respectively. For patients surviving 12 months post-treatment, there was a 93% probability of surviving 10 years post-treatment. During clinical development, the most commonly (≥ 5%) reported RVT-802 related adverse events included thrombocytopenia (11%), neutropenia (8%), pyrexia (5%), and proteinuria (5%).

“The journey of this therapy has involved the dedication and contributions of so many and, most notably, the bravery of patients and their families,” said Dr. Louise Markert, Professor of Pediatrics at Duke University School of Medicine, whose pioneering work at Duke led to the development of RVT-802. “It is gratifying to see this therapy advance a significant step closer to a potential FDA approval. We are hopeful we can look to a future of continuing to save children’s lives.”

“We congratulate the Enzyvant team on this important milestone, as well as Dr. Markert and her colleagues at Duke for their remarkable scientific accomplishments and dedication to athymic patients and their families,” said Myrtle Potter, Vant Operating Chair at Roivant Pharma, and Chair of Enzyvant’s Board of Directors. “We look forward to the potential of RVT-802 becoming available as an approved regenerative medicine to all families and patients who could benefit from it.”

Ms. Jacques will be presenting at Roivant Pipeline Day in New York City tomorrow, June 6, at 4:20 p.m. ET. To request access to the webcast or to learn more about Roivant Pipeline Day, please email pipelineday@roivant.com.

About RVT-802

RVT-802 is a novel investigational tissue-based regenerative therapy designed to treat primary immune deficiency resulting from pediatric congenital athymia. In a healthy, functioning immune system, T cells that start as stem cells in bone marrow become fully developed in the thymus. RVT-802 is designed to replicate this process in the absence of a thymus.

Derived from infant thymus tissue, RVT-802 is processed and cultured prior to implantation into a patient’s quadricep muscle. The patient’s bone marrow stem cells migrate to the implanted tissue product, where they are trained to become naïve, immunocompetent T cells. With the renewed ability to generate T cells, immune system function can be restored.

RVT-802 has been granted Breakthrough Therapy, Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT), Rare Pediatric Disease, and Orphan Drug designations by the FDA.

In 2016, Enzyvant entered into an exclusive worldwide licensing agreement with Duke University to develop RVT-802. M. Louise Markert, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Pediatrics at Duke University School of Medicine, has led research on the treatment of immunodeficiency in patients with congenital athymia. The findings of Dr. Markert and her research team have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine as well as numerous other peer-reviewed scientific journals and clinical publications.

About Enzyvant

Enzyvant, a wholly owned subsidiary of Roivant Sciences, is a biotechnology company focused on developing transformative therapies for patients with rare diseases. Enzyvant leverages the Roivant platform to develop therapies that address high unmet medical needs while driving greater efficiency in research, clinical development, and commercialization. The FDA has accepted Enzyvant’s Biologics License Application submission for RVT-802, a novel investigational tissue-based regenerative therapy for the treatment of congenital athymia and granted Priority Review. Enzyvant anticipates a regulatory decision in December 2019. The company is also preparing to initiate a clinical trial of RVT-801, an investigational enzyme replacement therapy for the treatment of Farber disease. For more information, please visit www.enzyvant.com.

About Roivant

Roivant aims to improve health by rapidly delivering innovative medicines and technologies to patients. Roivant does this by building Vants – nimble, entrepreneurial biotech and healthcare technology companies with a unique approach to sourcing talent, aligning incentives, and deploying technology to drive greater efficiency in R&D and commercialization. For more information, please visit www.roivant.com.

About Roivant Pharma

Roivant Pharma is the biopharmaceutical business unit of Roivant Sciences. Roivant Pharma is focused on end-to-end biopharmaceutical company creation, launch, and oversight. Roivant Pharma companies include Altavant, Aruvant, Axovant, Dermavant, Enzyvant, Genevant, Immunovant, Metavant, Myovant, Respivant, Urovant, and Arbutus.

About Roivant Pipeline Day

Roivant Pipeline Day will be held on Thursday, June 6, 2019 in New York City. The event will feature presentations and Q&A sessions from executives across the Roivant family of companies highlighting new clinical data and investments in technology. The event is scheduled to begin at 1:00 p.m. ET and will continue until approximately 4:30 p.m. ET. A live webcast will be available to interested parties. To request access to the webcast or to learn more about the event, please email pipelineday@roivant.com.

Contacts

Media:
Liz Melone
liz@scientpr.com

ORIGINALLY POSTED HERE

Biologist Examining Plant Roots

New Ag Tool: Plant Hormone that Speeds Root Growth

Scientists have identified a plant hormone, beta-cyclocitral, that makes tomato and rice plant roots grow faster and branch more. The hormone could help farmers enhance crop plant growth.

Biologist Examining Plant Roots

A molecule sold as a food additive has an underground role, too: helping roots grow faster.

When added to soil, the molecule, called beta-cyclocitral, speeds root growth in rice and tomato plants, scientists report May 8, 2019, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It also makes rice plants resistant to salty soil, which usually turns plants sickly and stunted. The molecule, a hormone found naturally in plants, could be a useful tool for farmers seeking healthier and more drought-resistant crops.

For centuries, plants have been bred for vigorous foliage and other easily visible traits. Because roots are hidden underground, “they’ve been largely ignored,” says developmental biologist Philip Benfey, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Duke University.

And yet, roots make up half the plant, points out coauthor Jazz Dickinson, also at Duke. She and Benfey wanted to find plant hormones that affected root development. Their previous research had hinted that some molecule chemically related to carotenoids – the pigments that give carrots their vibrant orange hue – might be important. But the researchers weren’t sure exactly which one, Dickinson says.

Many of these carotenoid relatives have been repurposed and are available commercially as food additives or dietary supplements. Dickinson rounded up about 20 and tested their effects on a common lab plant, Arabidopsis. She added each compound to the clear agar gel in which the plants were growing – a setup that let her easily see the roots – and monitored what happened over 10 days.

“Beta-cyclocitral stood out,” she says. It made the roots grow faster and also branch out more. And it had the same effect in rice and tomato plants, follow-up tests showed.

In rice plants, the team noticed an even more striking effect: the plants could also withstand salty soil. Irrigation of farm fields can make soil saltier, especially near the top. The team mimicked those conditions in the lab, and then watched how rice plants grew. “Untreated rice plants were very unhappy with that level of salt,” Benfey says. But with beta-cyclocitral added, the plants didn’t seem perturbed.

It’s possible that the compound helped the roots push down through the salty topsoil to reach the deeper, less-salty soil more quickly, Dickinson proposes.

The researchers hope that beta-cyclocitral will be useful agriculturally, either added to soil or sprayed onto crops. And since the molecule worked in both rice and tomatoes – two very different plants – it may boost root growth in crops more broadly.

[Originally posted by HHMI, May 9, 2019]

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

doctor holding tablet with manage my surgery app on display

Higgs Bosun Health

MANAGEMENT: Rajeev Dharmapurikar
DUKE INVENTORS: Nandan Lad, Ziad Gellad
higgsbosonhealth.com

Manage My Surgery (MMS) is developed by Higgs Boson, LLC and is a revolutionary application which navigates the patient through all phases of their surgical procedure. It provides a secure and HIPAA-compliant mobile platform which fosters communication between the patient, practice, and care provides. We have created different modules in Gastroenterology, Neuromodulation and Spine.

Manage my surgery logo

An overwhelming body of evidence has shown that patients who are more actively engaged in their care experience better health outcomes and incur lower costs. Preparation for an upcoming procedure can be a stressful process for a patient. Can I eat 24 hours prior? When do I stop my medications? How early do I need to arrive? Can I drive home? What type of pain can I expect post-procedure? Manage My Surgery provides real-time answers to these questions and more via a robust and user-friendly tool which empowers the patient throughout the life-cycle of the procedure. It provides patients, family members and providers reminders, checklists and procedure-specific information on one integrated mobile platform.

Higgs Boson, LLC consists of a team of seasoned physicians, surgeons (including 2 Duke faculty members) and information technology professionals who believe that the right data, in the right hands, at the right time can improve patient satisfaction and provide better outcomes.

Mobile Application

Prepped is a mobile application that generates helpful, timely suggested questions for patients and caregivers to ask their clinical providers. The app uses a strength in numbers in approach – Prepped crowdsources questions submitted by national experts, patients, caregivers and other users to recommend the best questions for the patient based on the patient’s profile and where they are in the disease process. Current versions of Prepped are focused on patients with cancer and/or COPD

Female doctor advising patient in hospital office during regular medical exam, healthcare and prevention concept.

MeTree

MANAGEMENT: Lori Orlando
DUKE INVENTOR: Geoff Ginsburg

MeTree is a family health history tool. Prior to an appointment, the doctor’s office will send an app-based survey for your/your family health history. Based on this data, the product will run algorithms, generate a report, and provide recommendations on lifestyle interventions with an overall goal of building a database of health, diseases, and outcomes.

metree logo

Family history in primary care

The systematic collection of family health history (FHH) can identify individuals at increased risk for common diseases including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer; many evidence-based guidelines rely upon risk stratification using FHH to guide the appropriate use of alternative (non-routine) screening procedures (such as breast MRI), diagnostic tests, and/or genetic counseling.

Unfortunately there are several barriers to the adequate collection of FHH within routine primary care: lack of patient preparation to provide FHH, the amount of time needed to collect FHH, lack of standardization, and limited training in synthesizing FHH data into a clinically actionable care plan.

MeTree

To address these issues, we have created a web-based patient-entered risk stratification and clinical decision support tool, MeTree, with the following design goals:

  • Develop a collection interface that is easy for patients to use and facilitates collection of all the necessary FHH and personal history components to perform risk stratification (full 3-generation pedigree with age of disease onset, current age or age of death, and cause of death for each relative)
  • Provide lay level and technical decision support that is clinically actionable for providers, activating for patients, and easy for patients and providers to understand • Base decision support upon guidelines widely accepted by PCPs and provide just-in-time education within the reports about what criteria triggered the recommendation, points to consider about the recommendation, data such as NNT, references to the guidelines, and links to additional resources
  • Capitalize on the patient-provider encounter to encourage discussions of preventive health and disease risk management.

MeTree will be available as an independent web-service that provides risk stratification and clinical decision support for the following conditions: breast cancer, ovarian cancer, colon cancer, hereditary cancer syndromes, coronary artery disease, hereditary cardiovascular conditions, stroke, aortic aneurysm, diabetes, and hereditary liver diseases (such as hemochromatosis).

security camera

Airgus

MANAGEMENT: Daniel Reichman
DUKE INVENTOR: Jordan Malof, Leslie Collins
ai-rgus.com

AᴉRGUS is an AI-based, low-cost, easy to use, and highly accurate solution. AᴉRGUS automatically inspects each camera and alerts you when the view is compromised by:

▪ Blur ▪ Tilt ▪ Tamper ▪ Obstruction ▪ Glare ▪ Black/blank screen ▪ More on request

ai-rgus logo

AᴉRGUS Dashboard

AᴉRGUS’s simple user interface saves operators’ time by streamlining the camera inspection process. You will also get reports, alerts, statistics and even work orders to make correcting your cameras’ wellness easy.

airgus dashboard
doctor holding clipboard with 3d heart overlay

Heart View Medical APS

MANAGEMENT:
DUKE INVENTOR: Olaf von Ramm
heartviewmedical.com

Our vision is to redefine the cardiology community’s understanding of the human heartbeat. HeartView Medical is developing the next generation high speed ultrasound system with extensive algorithms that enable automated quantitative measurements of the heart in a 3D view within one heart beat compared to current technology.

Heart View Medical Logo

ABOUT

 
Current state of the art: While imaging techniques are central to these advances, limitations exist in current imaging methods in their ability to rapidly record cardiac events (at physiologic speeds). At present, recording speeds are insufficient to properly link electrical activation to mechanical events and flow. ECG record activity in the 1-2 millisecond, i.e. 500-1000 events per second range while imaging methods (angiography, computed tomography-CT, magnetic resonance imaging-MRI and echocardiography) can record events between 5 to 100 times per second, thus substantially slower than ECG. In the case of 3D echo, CT and MRI, the problem is further confounded by the necessity to create images over multiple heartbeats where only portions of the image are obtained in a single heartbeat.A breakthrough in imaging of the heart at very high acquisition rates (physiologic rate imaging) is needed to further advance our understanding of the relationship of electrical, mechanical and flow events. Because of current slow imaging rates, it is likely that certain cardiac abnormalities remain undetectable. Developing a method to link these various cardiac activities holds a promise of providing a much more detailed understanding of how the heart works in normal and abnormal conditions with a potential to detect heart diseases earlier and to evaluate the results of current therapies more precisely and understand the impact of major risk factors such as diabetes and hypertension on the myocardium to open for new therapies. Moreover, echocardiography would improve the understanding of arrhythmia development for electrophysiology procedures and shorten procedure time and minimize patient risk.

SOLUTION

 
With a high-speed echocardiographic system Heart will change the way a heartbeat is understood from a diagnostic perspective. This means:
  • Diagnostic improvement for heart failure and tailored therapy with heart failure devices
  • Improved arrhythmia detection
  • Increased capability in detection of hypertrophy, fibrosis and scar
  • Potential to identify subclinical heart disease
  • Reduced need for MRI and CT
  • Substantially reduced acquisition time.
Medical blue background with pills

Sisu Pharmaceuticals

MANAGEMENT: Sean O’Brian
DUKE INVENTOR: Dennis Thiele, Jiaoti Huang

Sisu Pharma is dedicated to developing targeted drugs for patients with therapy-resistant Prostate Cancer. Prostate Cancer is the second most common cancer in men worldwide and there were over 1.3 million new cases of the disease globally in 2018. There are several treatments available for Prostate Cancer but none are curative and prolonged treatment inevitably results in resistance and death. Sisu Pharma’s proprietary technology specifically targets a key protein that is critical to the survival and spread of advanced Prostate Cancer, providing desperately needed treatment for patients with no remaining options.

sisu pharma logo