💊 TB vaccines need more investment; Pfizer and BioNTech slapped with patent lawsuit; Sanofi gets new flu shot facility

#312 | US FDA and India disagree; J&J on settlement spree; All our pollutants back in the sea

Hello and welcome back to The Kable for another edition packed with news of investments,  research, developments and life sciences legal drama.

BARDA and Sanofi have entered a public-private partnership to build a new formulation and filling facility for flu shots at the latter’s Pennsylvania campus, BARDA’s third major investment at this site.

The new venture firm Cure Ventures has raised $350 million to invest in drug startups. It hopes to make about 20 investments with a focus on company creation and early-stage startups.

France’s Pierre Fabre is entering an up to $553 million deal with Scorpion Therapeutics to develop and commercialise two preclinical lung cancer candidates. With a $65 million upfront payment, Pierre Fabre hopes that Scorpion’s drugs will have safety advantages over J&J and Takeda’s already-approved therapies.

The US’s AGC Biologics and Japan’s Jikei University have entered a service agreement for an exosome-based treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

Meanwhile, Vertex Pharma and CRISPR Therapeutics have completed their Biologics License Application (BLA) to the US FDA  for their gene-editing tech-based therapies for sickle cell disease and thalassaemia.

In the coming three months, we can expect critical decisions from the US FDA on RSV vaccines, an ALS drug, and muscular dystrophy gene therapy.

Over in Asia, the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation is solidifying its strategic partnership with AstraZeneca to support startups and position Hong Kong as a leader in life sciences innovation.

The International Vaccine Institute (IVI) has signed an MoU with South Korea’s Seegene to test 50,000 people in 8 Asian and African countries for HPV under IVI’s Global HPV Burden Study.

Brazil’s ANVISA has issued new guidelines for the submission of registration requests for synthetic and semi-synthetic drugs.

The Africa CDC has launched a call for applications for its Pathogen Genomics and Bioinformatics Fellowship Programme as it seeks to develop its workforce’s capacities in disease surveillance.

Pharma and biotech companies are cutting down projects and laying off people. Thermo Fischer is shutting down a facility in New Jersey and possibly laying off 113 employees (in what would be its second round of layoffs this year). VBI Vaccines is cutting costs as it prioritises its hepatitis B programmes.

Everyone is suing everyone when it comes to Covid vaccine development. After Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech are now at the receiving end of a patent infringement lawsuit from Arbutus and Genevant Sciences. Pfizer and BioNTech are also facing Moderna and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals in court in two separate lawsuits.

So what if their baby powders had cancer-causing substances? J&J is showing off its deep pockets by throwing money at the problem. A whopping $8.9 billion at that. Looks like J&J quite likes such settlement agreements, considering it even paid $5 billion to resolve opioid-related claims in 2021.

Doesn’t matter that cases are rising again; you may have started to forget about Covid. But Gilead Sciences hasn’t, as it revealed promising early data from the first human study of its oral Covid antiviral, paving the way for phase 3 trials.

In Nigeria, reports claim that about 10,000 women die of cervical cancer annually.

And finally, bird flu continues to fly around the world, jumping from species to species. In Canada, a poor dog, the first one to contract the new H5N1 strain, has died from the infection after chewing on a wild goose.