LONDON – AM-Pharma BV raised a further $52 million for the phase III trial of its recombinant alkaline phosphatase product, Recap, in treating sepsis-associated acute kidney injury (AKI), but now faces a delay in starting the study, as the COVID-19 crisis takes up more and more clinical resources.
HONG KONG – Phase II data of South Korea-based Qurient Co. Ltd.’s novel antibiotic candidate may offer hope that the first universal regimen to treat tuberculosis (TB) regardless of drug resistance status has been found.
Dragonfly Therapeutics Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., has expanded a strategic collaboration with Merck & Co. Inc. on the development of natural killer (NK) cell engager immunotherapies for oncology to add infectious disease and immune disorders. For $47.5 million up front, it's granting Merck the option to license exclusive rights to candidates developed using its TriNKET cell technology platform.
LONDON – The European Commission offered up to €80 million (US$89.4 million) of funding to Curevac AG, to scale up development and production of a vaccine against the coronavirus in Europe, following reports that the U.S. administration had made an offer for the German biotech, in order to get exclusive control of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate.
Undetected cases were a major driver of the early spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, China, despite being less infectious on a case-by-case basis, according to a modeling study published in the March 16, 2020, online issue of Science.
The number of biopharmas and nonprofits pitching in to find a treatment for COVID-19 continues to grow. In the past few weeks, that number has more than doubled and it shows no signing of slowing.
Lessons learned from development of hepatitis C therapies could be applied to the underserved hepatitis B population, potentially leading to a functional cure through a combination of optimized drugs that attack the virus from different angles. That is the mission of 2-year-old Aligos Therapeutics Inc., a South San Francisco-based startup focused on liver-related diseases.
Like Berlin patient Timothy Ray Brown before him, London patient Adam Castillejo, whose case was top story of the 2019 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), energized the HIV cure research field by his sheer existence. Curing HIV, Pablo Tebas told the audience at a themed discussion on curative strategies, “has been considered [for] a long time the holy grail.”
LONDON – The World Health Organization (WHO) has officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic, but is pushing back strongly against countries giving up on stringent control measures.
CYBERSPACE – Continuing improvements in HIV treatment and progress toward a cure notwithstanding, an effective vaccine will be necessary to gain the upper hand in the decades-long fight against the pandemic.
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