Members of the public disembark a train at King Cross Station in London, on the day that extra measures are put in place to fight the spread of the Omicron variant of Covid-19. Since Nov. 30, it’s been mandatory for people in England to wear face coverings in shops and on public transport. (Ben Cawthra/Sipa USA/Sipa via AP Images)
Like hundreds of other virologists and epidemiologists, Benjamin tenOever’s Thanksgiving weekend was interrupted with emails about an emergency Omicron meeting.
But when he logged onto a WHO conference call 9 a.m. Monday morning, officials had a surprisingly upbeat spin on the little-understood variant that had already prompted leaders around the world, fearful the strain could evade vaccines, to close their borders to broad swaths of Southern Africa.
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Even though many biopharma leaders have come together in recent years to address its gender gap, the consensus is clear: We still have a long way to go.
Companies this year were 2.5 times more likely than last year to have a diversity and inclusion program in place, according to a recent BIO survey, but women are still largely absent from executive roles. Getting women to enter the industry isn’t the problem — studies show that they represent just under half of all biotech employees around the world. But climbing through the ranks can be challenging, as women still report facing stereotypes, and, unfortunately, harassment.
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KEY POINTS
Patients prefer oral dosing, but swallowing tablets can be a challenge for many patients. The Zydis® orally disintegrating tablet (ODT) platform addresses challenges associated with oral dosing, expanding benefits for patients and options for healthcare providers. A strong growth trajectory is expected for ODTs given therapeutic innovation and continued technology development.
Many patients prefer conventional tablets for the administration of medications, but some geriatric and pediatric patients and those with altered mental status and physical impairments find swallowing tablets to be difficult. Orally disintegrating tablets (ODTs), which dissolve completely without chewing or sucking, offer a patient-friendly dosage form for the administration of small-molecule drugs, peptides and proteins. With the potential for multiple sites of drug absorption, often faster onset action for the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API), and potentially greater bioavailability, ODTs are an attractive option for drug developers considering first-to-market formulations or product line extensions of existing drugs with compatible API. In this report, we look at how innovation in the industry-leading Zydis ODT platform is expanding oral formulation options and bringing benefits to patients.
Please signup to continue — it’s fast and free. This article is sponsored by Catalent and produced by Endpoints Studio. Ugur Sahin, BioNTech CEO (Frank Rumpenhorst/dpa via AP Images)
The first substantial evidence for how mRNA vaccines will hold up against the new Omicron variant was released Tuesday night from scientists in South Africa.
The study, conducted by mixing sera from vaccinated individuals with live Omicron virus, showed that the variant could largely — but not entirely — dodge antibodies elicited by the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
The result suggests that the vaccines will be less effective at preventing infection by Omicron. But because many antibodies do still bind to the virus, experts say, boosters should help stem the decline. And efficacy will likely hold up against the most important metric for vaccines: preventing severe disease.
Stephen Hahn (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
Since leaving the FDA’s top post last January, Steve Hahn has been busy, jumping between multiple industry positions thanks to Flagship Pioneering, and most recently taking the helm at a startup focused on the detection of early cancer with a simple blood test.
Hahn’s new company, known as Harbinger Health, will receive $50 million from Flagship to use a proprietary platform combining AI and machine learning to potentially create an entirely new paradigm for cancer diagnosis, enabling early therapeutic interventions or prevention. Hahn’s prior work as chief medical executive of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center will likely inform his new role, where he’s serving as a Flagship CEO-partner as well as CEO of Harbinger.
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Sotio has been on a roll lately.
The quiet Czech biotech based in Prague got a massive $315 million raise last week, and now the biotech announced today that it’s joined in on a collaboration with Merck to evaluate a combo of Sotio’s lead candidate SOT101 with Merck’s PD-1 antibody Keytruda.
The two drugs will be tested in patients with advanced/refractory solid tumors in a Phase II trial. According to Sotio’s CEO, the two drugs combined had already shown efficacy in an ongoing Phase I/Ib trial.
The team at OncoMyx is trying to leverage one therapeutic to treat several forms of cancer, using the Myxoma virus. Wednesday, it announced the closing of a $50 million Series B financing to take it a step closer to that goal.
The round was co-led by Lumira Ventures and B Capital Group with participation from LYZZ Capital and its Series A investors Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, Delos Capital, Xeraya Capital, Korea Investment Partners, City Hill Ventures, and Madison Partners. Beni Rovinski, the managing director at Lumira Ventures, and Widya Mulyasasmita, the senior principal of healthcare at B Capital Group, will join the companies board of directors.
When prominent biotech founder David Sabatini was ousted by the Whitehead Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute this summer over sexual harassment allegations, he fought back with a lawsuit claiming he was falsely accused.
On Monday, a main defendant in that case — one of Sabatini’s accusers — filed a counterclaim maintaining that Sabatini condoned a ‘toxic and sexually charged lab environment,’ and that he coerced her into a non-consenual sexual relationship.
Martin Shkreli (AP Images)
The Federal Trade Commission and seven states on Tuesday announced a new order under which the states will recoup $40 million from pharma badboy Martin Shkreli, who’s currently in prison for securities fraud, and who spiked the price of an old, cheap toxoplasmosis drug Daraprim by 4,000% overnight.
The order follows a January 2020 complaint against Shkreli, his associate Kevin Mulleady, who’s banned from working in for pharma for 7 years, their company Vyera Pharmaceuticals and its parent company Phoenixus AG. The complaint alleged that Shkreli and Mulleady not only hiked the price of Daraprim but used restrictive distribution and supply agreements, as well as data secrecy, to illegally block cheaper generic versions of the drug.
Nomic is trying to develop the world’s highest throughput proteomic platform. It will now do so with another $17 million in tow.
The Montreal-based company announced the closing of its Series A financing round Wednesday that was led by Lux Capital, One VC and Casdin Capital. The funds will be used to help build the nELISA, a scalable form of ELISA — the decades-old technique for detecting proteins in a sample — that uses advances in DNA nanotechnology, an imaging technique called spectral multiplexing, and automation to bring a scalable and generalizable approach to multiplexed protein quantification.
https://endpts.com/omicron-is-a-stress-test-for-the-next-pandemic-but-the-world-keeps-making-the-same-mistakes/
