Pri­vate jets be­long­ing to six of the largest US drug­mak­ers land­ed at Wash­ing­ton, DC-area air­ports at least 127 times through Sep­tem­ber, ac­cord­ing to an End­points News analy­sis, dur­ing one of the high­est-stakes po­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tions for the in­dus­try in decades.

That adds up to a pri­vate plane from one of the com­pa­nies land­ing in Wash­ing­ton al­most every oth­er day. The trips come at a time of near-con­stant lob­by­ing and ne­go­ti­a­tion by the in­dus­try over drug prices, trade, sci­ence, the FDA and many oth­er is­sues.

To con­duct the analy­sis, End­points re­viewed pri­vate jet flight da­ta from a com­pa­ny called Jet­Spy, which tracks plane po­si­tion da­ta “from a va­ri­ety of sources.” The analy­sis looked at pri­vate jets op­er­at­ed by Ab­b­Vie, John­son & John­son, Pfiz­er, Mer­ck, Gilead and Eli Lil­ly, a sam­pling of the largest drug­mak­ers in the world that had da­ta avail­able on Jet­Spy.

Terns Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals has shelved its in­ves­ti­ga­tion­al obe­si­ty pill af­ter the drug was far less ef­fi­ca­cious in a mid-stage tri­al than in ear­li­er stud­ies.

The Cal­i­for­nia biotech’s shares TERN opened down about 11% on Wednes­day morn­ing, the day af­ter the da­ta were re­leased.

Af­ter three months of treat­ment, the GLP-1 ag­o­nist, co­de­named TERN-601, cut the weight of pa­tients with obe­si­ty by a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant mar­gin over place­bo. But the mag­ni­tude of the weight loss was poor. The top dose — 750 mg once a day — pro­duced a weight re­duc­tion of just 3.0 per­cent­age points over place­bo.

A low­er dose — 500 mg per day — was ac­tu­al­ly bet­ter than the high. Pa­tients us­ing a fast titra­tion scheme to reach this dose saw their weight drop by 4.6 points over place­bo, where­as those up­ping their dose to 500 mg more slow­ly had weight loss of 3.6 points more than place­bo.

The glob­al race to de­vel­op in vi­vo CAR-T ther­a­pies that could re­place oner­ous cell ther­a­pies with sim­pler, safer in­fu­sions con­tin­ues to heat up, and now a Chi­nese biotech start­up has qui­et­ly be­gun clin­i­cal tests of its treat­ments.

In an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view with End­points News, Star­na Ther­a­peu­tics said it's seen com­plete elim­i­na­tion of cir­cu­lat­ing B cells — the cells that can run amok