Fifteen years ago, at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), researchers announced that they had cured a patient – Timothy Ray Brown, initially known only as the Berlin Patient to preserve his privacy – of HIV through a hematopoietic stem cell transplant. Now, as researchers are gathered in Seattle for CROI 2023, reports of another cured patient were published Feb. 20, 2023, in Nature Medicine. Ten years after receiving a hematopoietic stem cell transplant, and 4 years after stopping antiretroviral treatment (ART), a 53-year-old patient may have been cured of HIV infection.
The A’s have it but the B’s don’t in Moderna Inc.’s pivotal phase III study of mRNA-1010, a seasonal flu vaccine for adults living in the southern hemisphere. Interim results showed the vaccine achieved superiority on seroconversion rates for influenzas A/H3N2 and A/H1N1, superiority on geometric mean titer ratios for influenza A/H3N2 and noninferiority on geometric mean titer ratios for influenza A/H1N1. However, noninferiority was not met for the endpoints against the influenza B/Victoria- and B/Yamagata-lineage strains.
Ascletis Pharma Inc. presented subgroup data from a phase II trial showing its subcutaneous PD-L1 antibody envafolimab (ASC-22) was able to functionally cure chronic hepatitis B, according to hepatitis B surface antigen decline following 24-week treatment.
Results published Feb. 17, 2023, in Immunity have given a wider view of what happens in the earliest stages of HIV infection. Treatments against HIV prevent the replication of the virus, but do not kill the reservoir of latently infected cells that starts to build almost immediately upon infection.
Erytech Pharma AS, repositioning itself to recover from a tough phase III cancer study failure in 2021, will merge with Pherecydes Pharma SA, which specializes in precision phage therapy for treating resistant and/or complicated bacterial infections.
Calibr at Scripps Research and the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute (Gates MRI) have entered into a strategic licensing agreement to advance development of a novel investigational compound for treatment of tuberculosis (TB).
Assembly Biosciences Inc. has selected development candidate ABI-5366 to progress to IND-enabling studies from its long-acting herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) helicase inhibitor program for high-recurrence genital herpes. The company is targeting IND/CTA filings in the first half of next year.
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