LONDON – These are hardly times for a fanfare, but this month saw the unveiling of a new name in bioprocessing, following the formal closing of the $21.4 billion sale of GE Healthcare’s Life Sciences to Danaher Corp. The business, now renamed Cytiva, has turnover of $3.3 billion, nearly 7,000 employees and operations in 40 countries. More than 75% of FDA-approved biologic drugs use its products in their manufacture.

DUBLIN – At the best of times, drug development is, of course, a complex problem. It is all the more demanding still in the middle of a pandemic, when the threat to human life is increasing exponentially, and health care systems are buckling under an extraordinary burden. Optimizing the development of drugs and vaccines in order to quickly generate high-quality evidence of their safety and efficacy is, therefore, a critical task, but an online webinar organized by the drug development consultants Certara LP, in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, suggested that, at this stage of the crisis, that lesson has yet to be absorbed.

The Korea Export Import Bank (KEXIM) took a step toward fulfilling its mandate to finance Korean companies’ overseas expansion by seeking managers for a new ₩400 billion (US$328 million) fund.

Specific therapies against a new disease take time to develop. But there are methods that can speed up that development – and in the meantime, there are ways to make do with what’s already in the cupboard.

Novavax Inc., one of the first biopharma companies to reveal its efforts to develop a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in January, has identified a prefusion protein for testing in an Australian phase I trial, slated to start in mid-May.