💊 Africa proposes global carbon tax; Mexico decriminalises abortion; A(nother) potential pandemic in the making

#423 | Blaming kidney failure on your genes; Sleeping to protect your brain; Climate change worsening air quality

Hello hello. Welcome back to The Kable. Egypt has been engaging with several countries lately, seeking out opportunities for bilateral cooperation in healthcare and pharmaceuticals. Armenia is the latest on this list, with the Ministers of Health of the two countries discussing joint pharma cooperation, universal health insurance, and medical tourism.

In a lesson for its neighbour to the North, Mexico’s Supreme Court did away with all federal criminal penalties for abortion yesterday. About 20 Mexican states still criminalise abortion, but the Supreme Court ruling will widen access to abortions through the federal healthcare system even in these states; it might even make it easier to overturn state legislation banning abortions.

Over in India, Ind-Swift Laboratories is selling its API and contract research and manufacturing services business to IndiaRF’s Synthimed Labs. The deal is valued at ₹1650 crore (~ $198.5 million).

In South Korea, Celltrion intends to invest about $95.3 million to construct a new drug product factory at its Songdo campus to address rising demand. The facility is set to be fully operational by 2027. The company believes the plant will reduce product costs by about 30% compared to products which are currently produced by contract manufacturing organisations.

Meanwhile, India-headquartered Lupin is collaborating with Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs and the COPD Foundation. The goal? To expand the availability of Tiotropium Bromide Inhalation Powder to COPD patients in the US.

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has entered a diabetes and cardiometabolic disease research alliance with Novo Nordisk. The partners will work to advance three programmes over the next three years – two to identify drug targets for clinically important subtypes of type 2 diabetes, and one to investigate the genetic roots of cardiac fibrosis.

In Sweden, a dead wild boar has tested positive for African swine fever. This is the first such case in the country. The nearest infected area is far away, so authorities presume that humans, to whom the virus is harmless, may have played some role in this poor boar’s infection and death.

A couple of updates from J&J. One, Janssen has elected to proceed under its license agreement with Cidara Therapeutics for universal prophylaxis for influenza A and B; this means that Janssen is now responsible for future development, manufacturing, and commercialization of CD388 though the pharma biggie intends to offload rights to another entity. Two, Janssen Biotech is turning its back on Aprocitentan, a blood pressure drug it acquired in 2017; it is returning the global rights to the near-approval treatment to Idorsia.

After Australian biotech CSL’s buyout of Vifor last August, CSL Vifor is now laying off 85 staffers in California.

More layoffs, as the US government-backed autoinjector maker AktiVax shuts down “substantially all of its operations” and says adios to around 70 employees.

And finally, data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service makes it official: the summer of ’23 was the hottest ever recorded.