AbbVie has teamed up with Voyager Therapeutics on a tau protein-targeting program, paying $69 million upfront for an option on the Alzheimer's disease candidate. The duo says they will apply Voyager's gene therapy vector expertise to develop a one-off Alzheimer's treatment that uses adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors to produce 'vectorized' anti-tau antibodies within the brain. According to AbbVie, that approach would have dosing advantages over current tau-targeting drugs in the industry's pipeline that could translate into a higher chance of showing efficacy.   

Aimmune has presented  strong data from a phase 3 trial of its peanut allergy treatment AR101. The Brisbane, California-based biotech plans to file for FDA approval by the end of 2018 to give patients a way to protect themselves against accidental exposure to peanut protein. Investigators enrolled almost 500 children intolerant to peanut protein doses of 100mg or less and randomized them to receive AR101 or placebo. After a 22-week dose escalation phase, participants continued to take 300mg a day of peanut flour AR101 or placebo until the end of the 12-month study. The patients were then given consecutive doses of peanut protein rising from 3mg to 1000mg to assess their ability to tolerate the allergen.