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.”

Just as Urovant gets ready for its first big FDA decision on vibegron, the drug has flopped in what would’ve been a follow-on indication.

In a Phase IIa trial involving women with abdominal pain due to irritable bowel syndrome, vibegron failed to meet the bar on improving “average worst abdominal pain” over 12 weeks, compared to placebo, among IBS-D patients.

There were actually slightly more responders in the placebo group than in the drug arm, with only 40.9% of those randomized to vigebron achieving at least a 30% decrease in “worst abdominal pain” in the past 24 hours. The trial enrolled 222 women but only 189 completed the study.

Genmab $GMAB has opted to ax one of its antibody-drug conjugates after watching it flop in the clinic.

The Danish biotech reported Tuesday that it decided to kill their program for enapotamab vedotin after the data gathered from expansion cohorts failed to measure up. According to the company:

While enapotamab vedotin has shown some evidence of clinical activity, this was not optimized by different dose schedules and/or predictive biomarkers. Accordingly, the data from the expansion cohorts did not meet Genmab’s stringent criteria for proof-of-concept.