GlaxoSmithKline bets another $345M cash on Vir, expanding Covid-19 partnership to flu, RSV and other viruses
After GlaxoSmithKline and Vir signed their $250 million partnership last April, they quickly ran into a problem.
The two were supposed to be working on CRISPR screens to identify potential targets for Covid-19, human genes that could be therapeutically knocked out with small molecules. But some of the genes the pair turned up for coronavirus were the same ones Vir was finding for RSV and flu, programs GSK didn’t have rights to. It forced the pair to walk an intellectual property tightrope. And it prevented them from combining data sets and potentially gleaning larger insight.
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