Paris-based Sanofi SA, responding to increasing medicine shortages and drugmakers' heavy reliance on active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) sourced from Asia, said it plans to create a major new API manufacturer headquartered in France.

LONDON – Six weeks on from the initial alert, “the window of opportunity” to control the COVID-19 epidemic is “narrowing,” according to the latest assessment from World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

LONDON – As the death toll passed 1,000 and the number of confirmed cases reached 42,000, the World Health Organization on Feb. 11 convened 400 scientists at a global research forum to draw up an R&D blueprint for COVID-19.

BEIJING – Multiple China-based clinical trials have been put on hold as the country concentrates on its fight against COVID-19. To curb the spread of the novel coronavirus that has infected over 72,000 people and killed nearly 2,000, China has imposed travel and transport restrictions, making trips difficult or even impossible for patients and physicians.

PERTH, Australia – As of Feb. 12, Australia’s Department of Health confirmed 15 cases of novel coronavirus in Australia.

The latest mutation to the coronavirus, dubbed COVID-19, has sparked a reaction by many national governments, but the expense associated with development of vaccines and diagnostics is considerable.

SEATTLE – Tracing the family tree of COVID-19 through its evolving DNA sequence makes it possible to disprove many false claims circulating on social media about the novel coronavirus, and, in particular, that it was generated in a covert biological weapons program. “From everything I’ve looked at, there is zero evidence for genetic engineering; it looks like normal evolution,” said Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, who has been using genomes sequences taken from patient samples to track the spread of the virus since Jan. 11.

PERTH, Australia – As of Feb. 12, Australia’s Department of Health confirmed 15 cases of novel coronavirus in Australia (five in Queensland, four in New South Wales, four in Victoria and two in South Australia). Of the confirmed 15 cases, five people have recovered and the others are in stable condition.

At this very early point in the emerging 2019-nCoV outbreak, knowledge about the virus is insufficient to predict what shape that outbreak will ultimately take.

The drug screens prompted by the SARS and MERS outbreaks have been useful for quickly identifying drug candidates. But in terms of their epidemiology, “SARS and MERS were different from this coronavirus,” Allison McGeer explained at a Feb. 3 webinar by Evercore ISI.