Vir Biotechnology Inc.’s focus will look a little different for the latter half of 2024, as the San Francisco-based firm disclosed a restructuring that will cut about a fourth of its workforce and phase out programs targeting influenza and COVID-19 as well as vaccines developed using its T-cell-based viral vector platform.
With the COVID-19 pandemic still visible in the rearview mirror, the World Health Organization (WHO) is taking no chances as it preps for human avian influenza, or H5N1, a subtype of influenza A.
SK Bioscience Co. Ltd. signed a simple agreement for a future equity (SAFE) deal totaling $2 million with Hingham, Mass.-based Sunflower Therapeutics PBC on July 25 to secure both Sunflower’s equity and its yeast-based protein manufacturing technology. The conditional agreement will grant SK Bioscience future equity rights in Sunflower without the need for immediate valuation, allowing for minimal investment.
Triastek Inc., of Nanjing, China, scored a potential $1.2 billion collaboration and platform technology license deal with Biontech SE to manufacture oral RNA therapeutics with 3D printing technology.
Many respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) disease vaccines are for older adults but Merck & Co. Inc.’s monoclonal antibody, MK-1654 (clesrovimab), which just produced positive top-line phase IIb/III data, aims at a far smaller and younger market. Data for protecting healthy preterm and full-term infants from RSV disease show the double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial hit all its primary efficacy and safety endpoints, including the incidence of RSV-associated medically attended lower respiratory infection for 150 days compared to placebo.
The 2024 meeting of the International AIDS Society (IAS), which is being held in Munich this week, began with the announcement of another curative bone marrow transplant. The new case brings the total number of patients cured of HIV via a bone marrow transplant up to 7 since “Berlin patient” Timothy Ray Brown became the first such person in 2007.
The industry is looking, with renewed hope, to the “promise” of messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics for a wide range of diseases beyond COVID-19, and not only in vaccine form but also for gene and cell therapies.
Having secured a 40% price cut and a commitment to not enforce a patent protecting a tuberculosis drug, South Africa’s Competition Commission decided not to prosecute a complaint accusing Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and its subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceutica (Pty) Ltd., of anticompetitive conduct.
Hillevax Inc. is turning its attention to preventing moderate or severe acute gastroenteritis events (AGEs) in adults with norovirus after the phase IIb NEST-IN1 trial testing virus-like particle-based vaccine HIL-214 in infants missed its primary and secondary endpoints, news that sent shares of the company (NASDAQ:HLVX) plummeting 88% to close July 8 at $1.64, a significant drop from the IPO price of $17 two years ago.
Curevac AG is casting off the deadweight of its pandemic push to translate its mRNA technology into a marketed COVID-19 vaccine, in a new €1.45 billion (US$1.6 billion) deal in which GSK plc will acquire full rights to infectious disease vaccines the two were co-developing.
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