💊 WHO roadmap to protect maternal lives; ADB funding to help Bangladesh make vaccines; Sanofi’s BioMap deal to further AI drug discovery

#447 | Rewiring your brain; Fighting cancer with routine shots; Driving AMR by over-sanitising

Hello, and welcome back to The Kable. China is set to extend support to Africa’s local vaccine production endeavours. China’s Recbio has inked a strategic cooperation agreement with the Zimbabwe National Biotechnology Administration and the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology China Regional Research Centre, or ICGEB. Under the agreement, Recbio will cooperate with ICGEB to provide vaccine production-related technical support in Zimbabwe.

In a bid to help the South Asian country reduce its dependence on vaccine imports, the Asian Development Bank will provide $338 million to Bangladesh to produce vaccines, especially for dengue and Covid.

A new antibiotic drug developed by researchers at the University of Hong Kong to target complex bacterial skin and soft tissue infections has been approved for clinical trials in humans. The patent for this cyclic lipopeptide category 1 drug is already licensed.

Taiwan has approved CANbridge Pharmaceuticals’ CAN108 to treat cholestatic pruritus (itching caused by slowed or stalled bile flow) in patients with Alagille syndrome. This is the first and only treatment approved in Taiwan for the rare genetic disorder.

Japan’s Kyushu University has inked an oncology-focused strategic partnership with GSK. The partners will devise early clinical trial strategies, launch trials, and streamline patient enrollment to ultimately accelerate drug development.

Why go all the way to the finish line when you already know you will win? Thanks to promising results from an interim analysis, Novo Nordisk is stopping a trial testing Ozempic for kidney failure in diabetes patients almost a year early. These results affirm the notion that GLP-1 agonists have benefits far beyond their original purpose.

There’s good news for Merck as well, as its Keytruda extended the lives of patients with stage 2 to 3b non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in a phase 3 trial. This trial marks the first time an immunotherapy has shown statistically significant overall survival benefits for certain patients with early-stage NSCLC.

Meanwhile, Bristol Myers Squibb just can’t get enough of the cell and gene therapy manufacturer Cellares. Just 6 weeks after Cellares announced that BMS would use its robotic production programme, BMS has now decided to employ Cellares’ Cell Shuttle platform for the automated proof-of-concept manufacturing of a certain CAR-T cell therapy in its pipeline.

Sanofi aims to become “the first pharma company powered by artificial intelligence at scale”. In keeping with this ambition, the company inked a $1 billion R&D deal with California’s BioMap. As its name suggests, BioMap leverages AI to develop biological maps of proteins and predict potential therapies in the fields of immunology, oncology, neurology, and rare diseases. Sanofi is paying over $10 million upfront to collaborate on this tech.

Breaking an industry-wide bottleneck in regenerative medicine manufacturing, yesterday, Bayer opened its first Cell Therapy Launch Facility in California. The company has invested $250 million to build the plant which will initially produce materials for late-stage clinical trials and eventually produce cell and gene therapies on a global scale. The plant is also equipped to support the potential launch of subsidiary BlueRock’s experimental Parkinson’s cell therapy.

Pfizer, meanwhile, is laying off an undisclosed number of people at its facility in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Bird flu has made a comeback in commercial poultry flocks in the US, showing up on turkey farms in the states of South Dakota and Utah.

But trust humans to come up with an ingenious solution to the avian influenza problem: gene editing. Scientists in Britain have used CRISPR to alter the ANP32 gene and make chickens resistant to lower doses of the less deadly form of bird flu that H5N1, which has been making waves globally.

Over in Australia, the government has purchased a supply of vaccines for lumpy skin disease, an infectious disease affecting cattle, from MSD Animal Health. The country currently has no traces of the disease, but infection scares earlier this month had temporarily halted live cattle shipments to Malaysia and Indonesia.

UK Research and Innovation, or UKRI’s Engineering and Physical Science’s Research Council has awarded a total of £41 million to 10 new projects. Funding has been allocated to an industrial biotech innovation cluster, innovative medical technologies, and more.

And finally, the Gates Foundation is celebrating two decades of its Grand Challenges innovation programme. Yesterday, at Dakar, the Foundation announced several new initiatives to support locally-led innovation and called on countries to urgently step up funding to accelerate health and development R&D.