Caption: The Biotech CEO Sisterhood and Breaking 7% gathered with allies for the first time at JPM25.\n Take a look back at the biggest stories of the week with Fierce Biotech’s conference\'s kickoff coverage here and the full lowdown from Day 2 here.Check out all the latest news below... Wednesday 6 p.m. ET Jan. 15Nkarta CEO Paul Hastings, a San Francisco local, attributed the thinner crowds to the unusually beautiful weather the city is having this week. “Every year that we have this conference, it\'s rained. This year it\'s been sunny, so there\'s a lot of people outside,” he explained. “We\'ve had very unique, wonderful weather for this time of year, and I think people have been enjoying the outdoors, and because the city\'s done such a nice job of making it safe and protecting everybody, people are outside and enjoying the sunshine. So, you\'re seeing less people crammed into lobbies and elevator spaces and umbrellas and things—I just did an interview outside on Union Square.”When asked about Nkarta’s shift in focus to autoimmune and priorities for the new year, Hastings said the company is singularly focused on enrolling patients in two clinical trials assessing NKX019, the biotech’s allogeneic, off-the-shelf, engineered natural killer (NK) cell therapy, “in order to get a transformative therapy available to patients as quickly as possible.” Wednesday 5 p.m. ET Jan. 15On the third day of the conference, Alto Neuroscience founder and CEO Amit Etkin, M.D., Ph.D., said there’s “definitely lighter attendance this year.”Etkin highlighted the year’s biggest acquisition thus far—Johnson & Johnson’s $14.6 billion buyout of CNS biotech Intra-Cellular Therapies—which was announced the first day of the conference.“What that says is that these disorders that affect many, many, many people, if you have a drug that\'s approved—and in their case, already selling—there\'s a lot of interest because there\'s a lot of need,” Etkin said.“That begs the question, with all the recent failures across companies, how do we actually go forward in this high-need place?” he continued.This has been top of mind since the Alto\'s phase 2b trial assessing ALTO-100 in major depressive disorder missed its primary and key secondary endpoints. However, Etkin said that after looking over the data, they identified “very high rates of compliance with a medication in the adjunctive arm, which explains the clinical effect, and much lower rates of compliance in the monotherapy arm, and that noncompliance came disproportionately from certain sites.”The problem—deemed to be so-called professional patients—has been a part of the field for a long time and is only getting worse, according to Etkin. Professional patients are people who participate in clinical trials but are exaggerating symptoms, don’t take the drug, or are motivated by money or attention.“Any one of these things leads you to not be an informative patient, and so you\'re not actually testing the drug,” Etkin said. “So, we took that to heart and said this is a problem we really need to fix.”To avoid this problem in another study of a depression drug candidate called ALTO-300, Alto conducted a blinded review of all patients in a separate phase 2b trial, removing 52 patients from the 200-person trial for a variety of reasons that “were indicative of site conduct issues and patient appropriateness,” according to Etkin. “And now we\'re going to be doing an interim analysis of that trial to make sure that we\'re—with these people—on the right track in terms of outcome empowering. And hopefully that gets us beyond this.”Going into 2025, the biotech’s mantra is to “rethink everything,” the CEO said. That includes reimagining how drug development happens, reconsidering challenges in trial execution and conduct that has plagued the field, and rethinking how tech is leveraged.All that rethinking is necessary, “because we just can\'t keep doing what we\'re doing as a field and expecting a different outcome,” Etkin concluded. “There has to be a better way to do this, and that is literally our motto.” Wednesday 3:30 a.m. ET Jan. 15Yesterday, spots of pink could be seen on the streets of San Francisco, and it wasn’t a coincidence. Members of the Biotech CEO Sisterhood urged allies to wear the color to underscore how few women continue to be represented in the throngs of blue suits at the conference.The effort was designed to highlight the need for continued leadership representation and access to opportunity, a spokesperson told Fierce Biotech. Wednesday 3:00 a.m. ET Jan. 15GSK’s Chief Scientific Officer Tony Wood, Ph.D., talks M&A, what the Big Pharma seeks in a partner, and how the company is looking to go beyond the current crop of GLP-1s and obesity. Story.
