Gilead has invested 1 billion yuan to accelerate clinical progress. Nash is the first drug to be used?

New artery medicine learned that on April 16, 2019, Gilead and insitro announced a strategic cooperation to develop a treatment plan for patients with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) The two companies signed a three-year, $1 billion partnership agreement Through this protocol, Gilead will use the artificial intelligence platform of insitro to create disease model for NASH, develop treatment scheme, and find the target which is helpful for clinical progress and disease regression In this cooperation, Gilead will obtain up to five newly identified targets, and has the right to further research and explore these targets "Through this cooperation, we will further study the biological basis and clinical spectrum of Nash, with the ultimate goal of accelerating the development of effective treatment programs for NASH patients." Dr John mchutchison, director of CSO and R & D at Gilead, said Insitro is an artificial intelligence company, which aims to build a prediction model for accelerating target selection and promoting treatment plan design by generating high-throughput functional genomic data sets consistent with patient data and interpreting these data through novel machine learning methods Gilead's goal is obviously to contact the power of machine learning to speed up his research process and reduce the risk of clinical trial failure From the perspective of transaction price, we have to say that Gilead is a big shot Geely will pay $15 million in advance and up to $35 million in milestone payments in the short term For the five targets mentioned above, Gilead also agreed to pay up to $200 million to insitro for preclinical, development, management and commercialization milestones for each target In addition, insitro will be eligible for a maximum two digit share of net sales of the corresponding product For projects that insitro chooses to join, it will have the right to obtain joint development rights in the United States, profit sharing in China, and milestone payments and licensing fees in sales in other countries except the United States This is not Geely's first deal in NASH From 2015 to 2018, Geely has successively expanded its Nash pipeline through the acquisition of phenex, nimbus therapeutics and scholar rock Not to mention clinical trials, Geely light has invested more than $4 billion in the acquisition of Nash pipeline In less than 40 years since its establishment, it has become one of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the world, among which suvaldi, the God drug of hepatitis C, has made great contributions The drug was launched in the United States in December 2013, with sales reaching an amazing $5.8 billion in the first half of 2014 Based on this, Gilead quickly established itself as a leader in the field of liver disease However, after enjoying the benefits for a short time, Gilead quickly found that things were not so simple As soon as suowadai went public, it became the focus of the industry, and its pricing of $84000 / course (1000 / tablet) was also controversial In addition, the audience is shrinking (suowati can achieve the cure of hepatitis C), and suowati's sales began to decline In 2017, the total revenue of Geely's hepatitis C business was US $9.137 billion, a decrease of US $5.697 billion compared with 2016; in 2018, the sales revenue of hepatitis C business was US $3.584 billion, which has been slightly surpassed by Alberta (US $3.516 billion) Sovaldi, a generation of stars, has fallen into a situation where product sales are no longer disclosed in detail (the combined revenue with cayston and Hepsera is $320m), and is close to being withdrawn from the stage Shareholders of Wall Street and Gilead sciences have been hoping that the company can use its cash reserves to make large-scale acquisitions, so as to inject fresh blood into the company and restore sales volume In 2017, Geely acquired kite Pharma with us $11.9 billion, which is also the hope of seeking more exports for the company in addition to liver disease business In recent years, according to a series of M & A and transactions of Gilead, the company has put more bets on the treatment of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) Nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is a more common chronic liver disease, but without intervention, it may form serious liver fibrosis, and eventually develop to cirrhosis or cancer According to the National Center for health statistics, about 2-5% of Americans suffer from nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), and another 10-20% have fat accumulation in the liver or fatty liver Nash is expected to overtake hepatitis C and become the main cause of liver transplantation by 2020 Moreover, no drugs have been approved for NASH treatment worldwide Research and markets forecasts that the global market share of Nash will reach 20.676 billion US dollars in 2025, and the annual compound growth rate will reach an amazing 46.1% in 2017-2025 In recent years, around the field of Nash therapy, many pharmaceutical giants have launched a fierce fight Faced with Nash's market share of US $40 billion, Geely Germany can't let it go Gilead has successively acquired three German biopharmaceutical companies, phenex, nimbus Apollo and scholarrock, and signed an authorization agreement worth 800 million US dollars with Yuhan, a Korean company After the purchase, Geely has the most complete product line in the Nash market, including the exclusive preemptive right of three TGFbeta antibodies, one ask-1 inhibitor, one ACC inhibitor and one FXR agonist At the same time, based on these products, Geely has also derived a number of combination therapies Among them, 48% of the patients who received gs-097620mg of firsocostat (gs-0976, ACC inhibitor) had a decrease in liver fat content of more than 30% "Cilofexor + firsocostat" combination therapy has entered the phase II clinical stage Gilead published a number of research data on the combination of non steroidal fxragonist cilofexor and ACC inhibitor firsocostat at the annual meeting of European Association for liver research (EASL) The data showed that 74% of the patients' liver fat content decreased by at least 30% compared with the baseline level In addition, the median value of alanine aminotransferase and glutamine transferase in serum decreased by 37% and 32% respectively at 12 weeks, and the synthesis of bile acid also decreased Another combination therapy product, combo ("selonsertib + cilofexor"), also announced the progress of clinical phase II research at the liver conference in San Francisco in November 2018 The results showed that compared with placebo, 39% patients' liver fat content decreased by more than 30%, serum γ - glutamyltransferase and fxractivated pharmacodynamic markers decreased significantly, and patients' drug tolerance was good Of course, Gilead's "Nash" road is not smooth, and the first phase III clinical failure of Nash drug also brought a great blow to the company Gilead announced on February 12, 2019 that selonsertib (gs4997), an ASK1 inhibitor, missed the first stage end point in the first phase III clinical trial Affected by the news, Gilead shares fell 3.5% in the day's closing trading In addition, the fierce competition in NASH drug research market also makes the company feel pressure, and the presence of Novartis, BMS, Pfizer and other competitors makes the market pattern more uncertain According to biomedtracker, there are 48 Nash drugs in clinical trials in the world, 14 of which are in phase I clinical trials, 30 in phase II clinical trials and 4 in phase III clinical trials Geely has acquired and collected Nash pipeline through many large-scale acquisitions, including clinical stage products, and this time spent another $1 billion to install "accelerator" for itself To some extent, the first piece of Nash treatment drugs, they are determined to get.