FDA Com­mis­sion­er Mar­ty Makary spent hours over the week­end at Rick Paz­dur's house try­ing to con­vince the agen­cy's long­time can­cer chief to step up to the role of top drug reg­u­la­tor, a source fa­mil­iar with the mat­ter told End­points News.

Part of that dis­cus­sion in­volved Makary as­sur­ing Paz­dur that as di­rec­tor of the Cen­ter for Drug Eval­u­a­tion and Re­search, he would have au­ton­o­my and in­de­pen­dence from bi­o­log­ics di­rec­tor Vinay Prasad, ac­cord­ing to the per­son, who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty. Prasad has feud­ed with past FDA lead­ers, over­ruled CBER re­view staff, and specif­i­cal­ly tar­get­ed Paz­dur on­line be­fore Prasad's time at the FDA.

LON­DON — Chi­na’s biotech sec­tor is steadi­ly mov­ing be­yond a “me-too” ap­proach to drug de­vel­op­ment thanks to a surge in qual­i­ty tal­ent, reg­u­la­to­ry flex­i­bil­i­ty and a lev­el of speed that’s tough to ri­val, in­dus­try ex­ec­u­tives said this week.

The sec­tor has seen more in­no­va­tion in re­cent years af­ter Chi­na adopt­ed cer­tain clin­i­cal tri­al frame­works that make it quick­er and eas­i­er for com­pa­nies to gen­er­ate key da­ta. Those changes have been par­tic­u­lar­ly ben­e­fi­cial for com­pa­nies de­vel­op­ing ex­per­i­men­tal ther­a­pies in the cell and gene ther­a­py space.

"We're prob­a­bly in­to the fourth gen­er­a­tion of biotech com­pa­nies in Chi­na now, so it's tak­en some time to evolve from 'me-too' prod­ucts," Zai Lab pres­i­dent and chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer Josh Smi­ley said in an in­ter­view at the Fi­nan­cial Times’ Glob­al Phar­ma and Biotech Sum­mit on Tues­day.

LON­DON — WuXi AppTec is cre­at­ing its first Eu­ro­pean head­quar­ters at its ex­ist­ing fa­cil­i­ty in Ger­many, the com­pa­ny’s US and EU pres­i­dent Rick Con­nell said Wednes­day.

“The time is right now to put the flag down and say, we're here. We're here to stay,” Con­nell said dur­ing the Fi­nan­cial Times’ Glob­al Phar­ma and Biotech Sum­mit in Lon­don.

The new head­quar­ters will be lo­cat­ed at the com­pa­ny’s site in Mu­nich, which is home to its drug dis­cov­ery ser­vice sub­sidiary called Cre­lux. WuXi AppTec al­so has a sec­ond Eu­ro­pean site in Cou­vet, Switzer­land, which pro­vides ser­vices in oral sol­id dose man­u­fac­tur­ing.

“While we have big op­er­a­tions in Asia and big op­er­a­tions in the US, we've on­ly had these two sites in Eu­rope, yet we have sev­er­al hun­dred cus­tomers here in Eu­rope,” Con­nell added.

Eli Lil­ly has dropped CVS Health as its phar­ma­cy ben­e­fit man­ag­er, se­lect­ing Right­way in­stead, ac­cord­ing to a re­port from Bloomberg News.

The out­let re­port­ed that at the be­gin­ning of the new year, Lil­ly em­ploy­ees cov­ered by the com­pa­ny’s health in­sur­ance will be au­to­mat­i­cal­ly en­rolled in Right­way’s ben­e­fits pro­gram.

A spokesper­son for Lil­ly con­firmed that it has se­lect­ed Right­way mov­ing for­ward but did not spec­i­fy which PBM Lil­ly had pre­vi­ous­ly worked with. A spokesper­son for CVS de­clined to com­ment on a spe­cif­ic cus­tomer but high­light­ed that CVS’ “over­all client re­ten­tion per­cent­age re­mains in the very high 90% range, year af­ter year. Those clients in­clude many ma­jor phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies.”