OBI Pharma Inc (台灣浩鼎) yesterday said it is to give an oral presentation about its new breast cancer vaccine, OBI-822, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in June.
The company, which received a notice from ASCO late on Wednesday, said ASCO is among the world’s largest and most influential professional organizations representing physicians of all oncology specialties providing care for cancer patients.
With more than 40,000 members, the organization reviews about 5,800 submissions each year, and OBI Pharma’s OBI-822 is among only 3.8 percent of submissions that have been selected for an oral presentation this year, the company said.
However, OBI Pharma chairman Michael Chang (張念慈) said that ASCO’s selection has little commercial implication for the company’s new treatment.
“ASCO’s selection is by no means an endorsement for the new drug, and will not affect the progress of ongoing clinical trials and regulatory approval, apart from a much-needed boost to morale among our employees,” Chang said at a press conference.
OBI Pharma has been embroiled in controversy since Feb. 21, when it announced that the results of its second and third-phase clinical trials of OBI-822 showed “no statistical significance.”
Since then, OBI Pharma shares have plummeted by nearly 40 percent from this year’s high of NT$719 on Feb. 19 to NT$351 at the end of Wednesday’s session.
The shares were suspended for trading on the Taipei Exchange to conform with regulatory guidelines at a time of disclosing material information.
Academia Sinica President Wong Chi-huey (翁啟惠), a close collaborator with the company, has also come under fire since it was revealed that his daughter, Wong Yu-shioh (翁郁秀), had sold a portion of her holdings in OBI Pharma on Feb. 18, just before prices went spiraling downward.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily yesterday reported that Wong Chi-huey had authorized the stock sale with his daughter’s stock broker at E.Sun Securities Co (玉山證券).
Regarding the allegations, Chang said that the company employs industry-standard protocols, where clinical trial information is handled and compartmentalized by external organizations.
“There were no instances of information leakage, and the allegations of insider trading using non-public information are unfounded,” Chang said, adding that Wong Chi-huey did not know of the discouraging clinical trial results until about two hours before the company held a press conference on Feb. 21.
However, Chang was unable to explain how Wong Chi-huey was able to authorize the stock sale on behalf of his daughter.
Wong Chi-huey had previously pledged that he did not hold any biotechnology stock positions.
“The company had instructed board members, managers and employees to halt all stock trades for one month prior to Feb. 21, but we had failed to include Wong Chi-huey and the company regrets the oversight,” Chang said.
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
INTENSIFYING THREATS: Beijing’s tactics include massive attacks on the government service network, aircraft and naval vessel incursions and damaging undersea cables China is prepared to interfere in November’s nine-in-one local elections by launching massive attacks on the Taiwanese government’s service network (GSN), a report published by the National Security Bureau showed. The report was submitted to the Legislative Yuan ahead of the bureau’s scheduled briefing at the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee tomorrow. The national security team has identified about 13,000 suspicious Internet accounts and 860,000 disputed messages, the bureau said of China’s cognitive warfare against Taiwan. The disputed messages focus on major foreign affairs, national defense and economic issues, which were produced using generative artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed through Chinese
COUNTERING HOSTILITY: The draft bill would require the US to increase diplomatic pressure on China and would impose sanctions on those who sabotage undersea cable networks US lawmakers on Thursday introduced a bipartisan bill to bolster the resilience of Taiwan’s submarine cables to counter China’s hostile activities. The proposal, titled the critical undersea infrastructure resilience initiative act, was cosponsored by Republican representatives Mike Lawler and Greg Stanton, and Democratic Representative Dave Min. US Senators John Curtis and Jacky Rosen also introduced a companion bill in the US Senate, which has passed markup at the chamber’s Committee on Foreign Relations. The House’s version of the bill would prioritize the deployment of sensors to detect disruptions or potential sabotage in real-time and enhance early warning capabilities through global intelligence sharing frameworks,
RSS