The need-to-know this morning

• Summit Therapeutics pulled a proposed $500 million stock offering "due to market conditions."
• Takeda said its experimental pill for psoriasis beat an approved pill from Bristol Myers Squibb in a head-to-head clinical trial. 
• Novartis said an experimental therapy for FSHD, a rare neuromuscular disorder, achieved the main biomarker endpoint in a mid-stage study.

drug costs

Seniors' drug costs rise sharply

From STAT’s John Wilkerson: The cost of covering seniors’ retail prescription drugs started rising sharply this year, according to the annual report that Medicare trustees released this week.

The headline that you probably saw everywhere from that report is that Medicare’s hospital fund is projected to run out of money in about seven years, at which point reimbursements would be cut. But let’s focus on Part D.

Expenditures were about $180 billion in 2025, up from $157 billion the prior year. Spending this year is projected to rise to $218 billion.

While that’s news, policy nerds (like me) were disappointed that the report didn’t say, or even hint at, how much the trustees expect it will cost to cover seniors’ weight-loss drugs in a pilot program, called the Bridge demonstration, that starts next month. The Trump administration failed to get private Medicare insurers to voluntarily offer that coverage, leaving taxpayers to pick up the tab.

“This program will operate outside of the Medicare Part D plan benefit coverage and will result in additional government contributions,” the report states in one of its only passing mentions of the program.

The report does place much of the blame for higher drug spending on the uptake of GLP-1 drugs, as well as other specialty drugs. But that’s far from the sole reason. Democrats’ redesign of Part D also caused disturbances to the program. And the savings from Medicare drug price negotiation take longer to be fully realized than the provisions that raise costs. Plus, Republicans’ tax law subsequently exempted or delayed certain drugs from Medicare pricing negotiations.

cancer

Enliven's leukemia drugs could be competitive

An experimental chronic myeloid leukemia drug from Enliven Therapeutics called ELVN-001 induced major molecular responses in nearly half of heavily pretreated patients in an ongoing Phase 1 study, STAT’s Adam Feuerstein notes in his weekly Biotech Scorecard newsletter. There were higher response rates among the patients who were treated earlier in their disease course.

The results seem to compare favorably with Scemblix, a Novartis blockbuster, as well as with Merck’s CML drug TERN-701, which it acquired as part of its $6.7 billion purchase of Terns Pharmaceuticals. But ELVN-001 binds to the BCR-ABL target differently, which could prove potentially useful for patients whose disease progresses while taking Scemblix. Enliven has been cleared by the FDA to launch a Phase 3 study later this year.

Read more.