A team at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia San Diego that’s been fa­cil­i­tat­ing stud­ies on the front­lines of Covid-19 has re­ceived a $54.7 mil­lion grant from the NIH to bind ba­sic re­search with clin­i­cal care even more tight­ly to­geth­er.

Every year the 1,000 fac­ul­ty and staff at the Alt­man Clin­i­cal and Trans­la­tion­al Re­search In­sti­tute part­ner with UCSD Health to help run 250 tri­als — in­clud­ing re­cent tri­als in­ves­ti­gat­ing “an an­tivi­ral drug, an arthri­tis drug and a med­ica­tion for hy­per­ten­sion” as treat­ments for the coro­n­avirus in­fec­tion.

In re­sponse to the pan­dem­ic, the AC­TRI al­so sets up a biobank to col­lect and dis­trib­ute sam­ples for re­searchers work­ing on di­ag­nos­tics and treat­ments.

The new grant, which will be award­ed over five years, brings the to­tal fed­er­al fund­ing it’s re­ceived since it opened in 2010 to $144 mil­lion.

“The first CT­SA laid the foun­da­tion for trans­form­ing our in­sti­tu­tion. It built the ear­ly in­fra­struc­ture that would help change the way we thought about mov­ing dis­cov­er­ies from the lab to the clin­ic,” found­ing di­rec­tor Gary Firestein said in a state­ment. “The sec­ond CT­SA fo­cused on mak­ing AC­TRI the hub for clin­i­cal re­search and clin­i­cal tri­als at UC San Diego.”

This third in­fu­sion will in­tro­duce new re­sources on top of all that, with a fo­cus on dis­cov­ery and in­no­va­tion.

His group had been prac­tic­ing such an ap­proach for the past few years, serv­ing as a test­ing site for the Tri­corder XPRIZE com­pe­ti­tion to eval­u­ate emerg­ing med­ical tech­nol­o­gy.

Specif­i­cal­ly, the AC­TRI will be launch­ing two new cen­ters: De­vice Ac­cel­er­a­tion Cen­ter and Cen­ter for Ex­cel­lence in Im­munogenomics. It will al­so ex­pand pro­grams to sup­port young fac­ul­ty, train in­ves­ti­ga­tors and teach grant-writ­ing.

“Sci­ence and med­i­cine of­ten op­er­ate in par­al­lel uni­vers­es,” Firestein said. “We’ve tak­en steps to bring them to­geth­er, but we want to go far­ther in in­te­grat­ing re­search and clin­i­cal care.”

There haven’t been a lot of big venture rounds for biotech companies looking to run a Phase II study in Alzheimer’s.

The field has been a disaster over the past decade. Amyloid didn’t pan out as a target — going down in a litany of Phase III failures — and is now making its last stand at Biogen. Tau is a comer, but when you look around and all you see is destruction, the idea of backing a startup trying to find complex cocktails to swing the course of this devilishly complicated memory-wasting disease would daunt the pluckiest investors.

In 2011, GlaxoSmithKline’s Benlysta became the first biologic to win approval for lupus patients. Nine years on, the British drugmaker has unveiled detailed positive results from a study testing the drug in lupus patients with associated kidney disease — a post-marketing requirement from the initial FDA approval.

Lupus is a drug developer’s nightmare. In the last six decades, there has been just one FDA approval (Benlysta), with the field resembling a graveyard in recent years with a string of failures including UCB and Biogen’s late-stage flop, as well as defeats in Xencor and Sanofi’s programs. One of the main reasons the success has eluded researchers is because lupus, akin to cancer, is not just one disease — it really is a disease of many diseases, noted Al Roy, executive director of Lupus Clinical Investigators Network, an initiative of New York-based Lupus Research Alliance that claims it is the world’s leading private funder of lupus research, in an interview.

Before remdesivir soaked up the spotlight amid the coronavirus crisis, Gilead’s filgotinib was the star experimental drug tapped to rake in billions competing with other JAK inhibitors made by rivals including AbbVie and Eli Lilly.

Now, long term data on the drug — discovered by Gilead’s partners at Galapagos and posted as part of a virtual medical conference — have solidified the durability and safety of filgotinib in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, spanning data from three late-stage trials. An FDA decision on the drug is expected this year.

Last September, when Pfizer celebrated positive data from a second Phase III study of abrocitinib, many watchers applauded the efficacy but were still waiting to see whether the JAK1 inhibitor is “safe enough to be a formidable competitor to Dupixent,” the clear leader in the atopic dermatitis field. The full slate of safety data are now out and, according to one analyst, the answer is: probably not.