Amgen

Keith is also executive chairman at Vivo Sim Labs, previously known as Organovo, a company he founded in 2007 that provides bioprinted tissue models for toxicity testing and drug development.

Before Organovo, he spent 10 years at Amgen, where he was, among other things, global operations leader for the development of Denosumab, a.k.a. Perlia, and Exgeva, which became a blockbuster product for Amgen many times over.

Keith is an inventor, a biotech investor, and an entrepreneur, and I'm thrilled to have him on the show today to talk about building Organovo.

and proving the utility of bioprinted human tissue, his current work as CEO at Vizient Bio, and the regulatory policies that could help change how drug safety is tested and lower the costs of development.

And it's an interesting technology that And it's, you know, that derives from all Langer's work specifically.

It was a previous company, I think, Enzatec that Alkermes had bought.

OK, so then from Alkermes, you joined Amgen, where you were steadily promoted over a 10 year period.

What what can you tell me about that experience, Keith, and and maybe how it led to the founding of Organovo?

We won't get into it right now, but maybe we can follow up then.

The other one I think worth mentioning is we've been waiting for somebody to address Amgen's request for encounter data, which starts November 15th.

We're a few weeks out.

Again, you don't have to submit anything for 45 days.

So, hey, 1-1-27 roughly is when the first round of data is going to be due by.

So not something we should be ignoring, but I did see that NAC's taking them on first, right? I was hoping for somebody else to jump in on that as well from the hospital side, but NAC's kind of asking HRSA to suspend Amgen's 340B healthcare encounter data requests and make a few good points there.

So we'll see how that plays out.

But yeah.

So that means, realistically, there was just a really top-heavy group that was accounting for a majority of the payments.

And out of the payments that were given, the companies that were most likely to be represented were Horizon, which is now Amgen, which is for thyroid eye disease, Galderma and Allergan, which we all know are very big cosmetic injectables and products for cosmetic-based procedures.

And so I think there are a few interesting points you can make from this paper.

The first is that the majority of the payments are going to relatively few individuals within our society and a significant amount of our members are receiving minimal to no payments.

If you look at it by distribution, I think Galderma and Allergan are really top heavy.

They're giving a lot of money to very select few people.

And then Horizon, which is now Amgen, was paying more of a middle distribution.

So the paper makes a mention that 69 surgeons were being paid somewhere between $10,000 and $100,000, which is a way larger distribution than the Allergan and Galderma categories for that same amount of money.

Jane King is in New York with those stories and more in today's health and wellness report.

A drug from Amgen could give patients with a notoriously aggressive form of lung cancer significantly more time to live when added to an immunotherapy from AstraZeneca.

Full results from a late stage trial show that combining the two drugs slashed the risk of death by 58% in patients with extensive stage small cell lung cancer.

An experimental vaccine developed by Merck and Moderna could become the first vaccine of its kind to treat cancer.

They're mostly healthcare focused right now.

You see Merck and Abbott and Amgen.

You see some industrial.

You include Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble.

This is very, very encouraging news from the world of cancer, the wars against cancer.

A company called Amgen.

Amgen is one of the big pharma companies, and they released really just late yesterday incredible news of the results of their drug to fight small cell lung cancer.

And apparently very, very good news as far as that is concerned right now.

Wanted to tell you that when combined with an immunotherapy drug from AstraZeneca, Amgen says that they were able to slash the risk of death by patients who are dealing with extensive stage small cell lung cancer by 58%.

and basically increased their average, their median overall survival to almost two years compared to just one year before.

A little bit of a personal story for me.

I had a very close friend who passed away from this form of lung cancer, even though she never smoked a cigarette in her life earlier this year.

This is very, very encouraging news from the world of cancer, the wars against cancer.

A company called Amgen.

Amgen is one of the big pharma companies, and they released really just late yesterday incredible news of the results of their drug to fight small cell lung cancer.

And apparently very, very good news as far as that is concerned right now.

Wanted to tell you that when combined with an immunotherapy drug from AstraZeneca, Amgen says that they were able to slash the risk of death by patients who are dealing with extensive stage small cell lung cancer by 58 percent and basically increase their average of their median overall survival to almost two years compared to just one year before.

A little bit of a personal story for me.

I had a very close friend who passed away from this form of lung cancer, even though she never smoked a cigarette in her life.

earlier this year.