💊 Akagera Medicines joins CEPI’s 100 Days Mission; Europe’s strategy for AI in medicines regulation; EU countries dump hoarded vaccines

#497 | A new “variant of interest”; The end of COVAX; A new South-South health cooperation initiative

Hello, and welcome back to The Kable. Yesterday, the WHO classified the JN.1 coronavirus strain as a "variant of interest". Current evidence suggests that the risk to public health from this strain is low. While it is more easily transmissible than currently circulating strains, it does not cause more severe disease. 

While we're on the topic of Covid, 31 December 2023 will mark the end of COVAX. Low- and lower-middle-income economies will continue to receive Covid vaccines and delivery support from Gavi in 2024 and 2025 under regular immunisation programmes.

Yesterday, the Health Development Partnership for Africa and the Caribbean (HeDPAC) was launched to advance South-South health cooperation. The initiative will focus on strengthening the health workforce and sharing innovative solutions in primary health care, especially concerning climate resilience and maternal and child health. It will promote tech transfer for pharma manufacturing, build regulatory capacity, and further the UHC agenda in Africa and the Caribbean. 

The women's health company Organon has entered an agreement with Eli Lilly to become the only distributor and promoter of two of its migraine medicines in Europe. 

The Israeli clinical-stage oncology company Compugen and Gilead Sciences have entered an exclusive license agreement – worth $848 million – for the potential first-in-class preclinical antibody programme against the IL-18 binding protein to inhibit cancer growth. 

The French-American AI-focused biotech Owkin has inked a collaboration agreement with MSD. The partners will develop and commercialise AI-powered digital pathology diagnostics for the European market. They want to develop a pre-screening procedure to improve testing rates for MSI-H (microsatellite instability-high, indicating a high level of instability in a tumour) in endometrial, gastric, small intestinal, and biliary cancers.

Meanwhile, in India, JB Pharma has acquired trademark licenses and distribution rights of select Novartis ophthalmology brands. Effective January 2027, this deal is "perpetual in nature" and cost JB a total of Rs 1089 crore. 

And finally, AI-generated drug candidates are here. But successfully getting them through clinical trials? Now that journey is longer, with more twists and turns expected - drugs fail in clinical trials more than 90% of the time. MedCity News covers the highs and lows of biotechs seeking success in this space.