💊 Gavi's new vaccine programmes; CEPI, Jurata partner for needle-free vaccines; AbbVie, Sanofi's love affairs with AI

#487 | A new November record; Respiratory co-infection risks; Opioid crisis-fighting tools

Hello, and welcome back to The Kable for yet another exhilarating day, free from news of disease and devastation. Well, except that we are actually covering some devastation. And some disease.

Like Zimbabwe, for example, where a rapidly progressing cholera outbreak is leading the government to try something radical: dig more borewells.

In India, it is news as usual, with a host of pharma firms, big and small alike, being subject to US FDA inspections.

In Japan, cannabis will soon be on the (healthcare) menu after the country’s parliament passed a bill to legalise medicines derived from cannabis.

Over in the Americas, PAHO, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the World Bank have launched an alliance to enhance primary health care, focusing on investment, innovation, and policy implementation to recover from pandemic impacts and address healthcare disparities and system weaknesses.

India and South Africa were at the forefront of calls for patent waivers for Covid diagnostics and therapeutics. The two countries are joined by 6 others in asking the WTO to impose a five-year global patent waiver, arguing for broader access and addressing the pandemic's ongoing challenges and inequitable access to vital medical tools. 

CEPI continues its 100-day mission with a new partnership with Jurata to create needle-free mRNA vaccines.

Big Pharma continues its love affair with AI/ML. First, AbbVie announced a partnership with BigHat Biosciences to identify targets in cancer and neurology. Elsewhere, Sanofi has entered a multi-year research collaboration with Aqemia, committing up to $140 million to discover drug candidates using Aqemia's AI platform.

Remember that devastation we spoke about just a little bit earlier? Yeah, it is the planet we’re wreaking all that devastation upon, with the UN saying climate change is witnessing an “alarming” surge. At the ongoing UN conference to discuss measures to alleviate the impact of climate change, curtailing fossil fuel emissions, for some reason, doesn’t seem to be priority number one, even as health bodies around the world call out the continued impact of fossil fuels on animal, human, and planetary health. 

And finally, speaking of devastation, November made it six months in a row of setting new global heat records. Yay!