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.”

The biotech industry has faced repeated calls to diversify its workforce — and in the last year, those calls got a lot louder. Though women account for just under half of all biotech employees around the world, they occupy very few places in C-suites, and even fewer make it to the helm.

Some companies are listening, according to a recent BIO survey which showed that this year’s companies were 2.5 times more likely to have a diversity and inclusion program compared to last year’s sample. But we still have a long way to go. Women represent just 31% of biotech executives, BIO reported. And those numbers are even more stark for women of color.

In the insular world of biotech, a spectacular failure can sometimes stay on any executive’s record for a long time. But for David Meek, the man at the helm of FerGene’s recent implosion, two questionable exits made way for what could be an excellent rebound.

Meek, most recently FerGene’s CEO and a past head at Ipsen, has become CEO at Mirati Therapeutics, taking the reins from founding CEO Charles Baum, who will step over into the role of president and head of R&D, according to a release.

After a busy weekend at #ESMO21, which included a big readout for its KRAS drug adagrasib in colon cancer, Mirati Therapeutics is ready to keep the pressure on competitor Amgen with lung cancer data that will undergird an upcoming filing.

In topline results from a Phase II cohort of its KRYSTAL-1 study, adagrasib posted a response rate of 43% in second-line-or-later patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer containing a KRAS-G12C mutation, Mirati said Monday.

The FDA has rejected Verrica’s new drug application for VP-102 again, with the company pinning the CRL on problems at a CMO that it was partnered with, the company announced Monday.

The FDA didn’t raise issues that directly relate to the manufacturing of VP-102, the company said, but raised “general quality issues” at the CMO’s facility. There were also no clinical concerns, it said, or need to collect more data.