Ab­b­Vie has struck a "most fa­vored na­tion" deal with the White House to low­er drug prices, the sec­ond-to-last of the 17 phar­ma com­pa­nies to reach an agree­ment af­ter fac­ing a de­mand from Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump last sum­mer.

The com­pa­ny said it will pro­vide low­er prices in Med­ic­aid and par­tic­i­pate in Trump’s di­rect-to-pa­tient plat­form TrumpRx, which is ex­pect­ed to launch ear­ly this year. In ex­change, Ab­b­Vie said it will be ex­empt from tar­iffs and fu­ture price man­dates, but did­n't give fur­ther de­tails. Oth­er drug­mak­ers, in­clud­ing Am­gen, Bris­tol My­ers Squibb and GSK, have se­cured a three-year re­prieve from tar­iffs un­der their re­spec­tive deals.

“Ab­b­Vie is fol­low­ing Pres­i­dent Trump's call to ac­tion by reach­ing this agree­ment, al­low­ing us to col­lec­tive­ly move be­yond poli­cies that harm Amer­i­can in­no­va­tion,” CEO Rob Michael said in a Mon­day re­lease.

On Josh Lehrer's first day as CEO of Marea Ther­a­peu­tics in Oc­to­ber 2023, he found out the biotech's sec­ond pipeline drug had­n't lived up to the star­tup's ex­pec­ta­tions in a mon­key study.

The Bay Area biotech al­ready had a clin­i­cal-stage car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease treat­ment that it had li­censed from No­var­tis. But Marea want­ed to take a sec­ond drug in­to the clin­ic, for the rare dis­ease acromegaly, to fill out its pipeline.

Luck­i­ly, Marea had been work­ing on a back­up, called MAR002, and a few months lat­er, it was ad­vanc­ing — sav­ing the biotech from killing off its work in acromegaly, chief sci­en­tif­ic of­fi­cer Ethan Weiss said in an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view with End­points News on the side­lines of the an­nu­al JP Mor­gan Health­care Con­fer­ence in San Fran­cis­co.

Sen­tynl Ther­a­peu­tics has se­cured the first US ap­proval of a ther­a­py for a rare and fa­tal ge­net­ic con­di­tion called Menkes dis­ease.

The com­pa­ny's as­set Zy­cubo was ap­proved af­ter be­ing knocked back by the FDA in Sep­tem­ber. The green light fi­nal­ly came on Mon­day, a cou­ple of days ahead of the drug’s new PDU­FA date.

Sen­tynl is a US sub­sidiary of the In­di­an com­pa­ny Zy­dus Life­sciences.

Around one in every 100,000 to 250,000 ba­bies is born with the mu­ta­tion that caus­es Menkes dis­ease. The ge­net­ic ab­nor­mal­i­ty af­fects a cop­per trans­porter pro­tein in the gut, pre­vent­ing the cor­rect dis­tri­b­u­tion of cop­per through­out the body. Pa­tients ex­pe­ri­ence seizures, and have im­paired growth, de­vel­op­men­tal de­lays and in­tel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty. Those with the most com­mon form of Menkes rarely live past three years.