💊 Fresh funding for healthcare-focused European VCs; Regulatory harmonisation for LatAm; Vaccine hesitancy cause for concern

#323 | GSK workers to strike in May; Ketamine kicks the blues away; Coffee keeps heart disease at bay

Hello, and welcome back to The Kable.

To begin with, two venture capital firms from Europe have raised fresh funding for life sciences companies. Forbion has €750 million in store for new companies and another €600 million for late-stage companies. Dutch firm Gilde Healthcare raised €600 million for its fund focused on digital health, medtech and therapeutics companies in Europe and North America developing affordable solutions.

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the Global Health Investment Corporation (GHIC) have signed an MoU to enhance their cooperation in vaccine R&D and manufacturing for emerging infectious diseases. The organisations intend to jointly identify and possibly jointly even fund new vaccine development platforms with the potential to benefit global health.

South Korea’s Daewoong Pharmaceuticals and the UK’s Sygnature Discovery are entering a research collaboration focused on discovering novel drugs for autoimmune diseases.

In Ghana, with a €5 million grant from the European Investment Bank, work has begun on DEKs Vaccines’ manufacturing facility, which will produce about 600 million vaccines for malaria, pneumonia, rotavirus and cholera every year. The plant will also fill, finish and package vaccines for Covid, malaria and TB.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the workers' union Unite is calling for walkouts at 6 GSK manufacturing sites in May. This action comes as workers believe the company’s pay rate increase is insufficient in the face of the cost of living crisis.

On South America’s Pacific coast, avian flu has claimed the lives of thousands of sea lions, penguins, pelicans, swans and other animals.

Over in the US, researchers believe the currently circulating avian influenza is dangerously different from what we’ve seen before. The highly pathogenic virus is infecting and killing wild birds and poultry (and also some mammals) in higher numbers than ever before. This avian virus may have abandoned its seasonal ways to become a year-round disease and could become endemic, affecting food security and the economy.

In Nigeria, Lassa fever has now claimed a total of 151 lives from amongst 869 confirmed cases across 26 states this year.

And finally, a group of scientists from five countries is the first to use a nutrigenomics approach to assess the severity of disease caused by Covid. Apparently, Indians may have been saved by idli, rajma, tea and turmeric.