STAT+: J&J spends $1 billion to enter KRAS race for cancer treatments
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Johnson & Johnson said Monday it will purchase the startup Firefly Bio for $1 billion in an effort to expand its work in the suddenly buzzy field of KRAS inhibitors. The deal comes less than two months after Revolution Medicines showed that a KRAS-targeted drug could nearly double survival in metastatic pancreatic cancer, one of the most intractable tumors known to medicine.&#x A0; KRAS has long been in the sights of drug developers, because mutant forms of the gene and protein are found in around 30% of all tumors. But before Revolution Medicines, companies had struggled to find molecules that could latch on to and shut down a protein. Chemists compared the protein to a “greasy ball.”Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…