Mer­ck took a big gam­ble when it opt­ed to jump in­to the Covid-19 vac­cine race late, and made an equal­ly mo­men­tous de­ci­sion to back out in late Jan­u­ary. Now, look­ing to chip in on the ef­fort, Mer­ck re­port­ed­ly agreed to team up with one of the com­pa­nies that has al­ready crossed the fin­ish line.

Pres­i­dent Joe Biden on Tues­day is ex­pect­ed to an­nounce a part­ner­ship be­tween drug­mak­ers Mer­ck and John­son & John­son to joint­ly pro­duce J&J’s re­com­bi­nant vi­ral vec­tor Covid-19 vac­cine that re­ceived the FDA’s emer­gency use au­tho­riza­tion Sat­ur­day, the Wash­ing­ton Post re­port­ed.

Un­der the terms of the deal, which un­named of­fi­cials out­lined for the Post, Mer­ck will pro­duce J&J’s sin­gle-shot vac­cine at two fa­cil­i­ties. One of those will han­dle fill-fin­ish work — the last stage be­fore dis­tri­b­u­tion — and an­oth­er will pro­duce bulk drug sub­stance for the shot, like­ly af­ter a tech­nol­o­gy trans­fer. Of­fi­cials told the Post the deal would po­ten­tial­ly dou­ble J&J’s pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty, a mas­sive win giv­en the drug­mak­er’s re­port­ed man­u­fac­tur­ing bot­tle­neck.

With­out the Mer­ck deal in place, J&J ex­pect­ed to roll out about 100 mil­lion vac­cine dos­es be­fore the back half of the year and hoped to churn out enough sup­ply to vac­ci­nate 20 mil­lion Amer­i­cans by the end of March.

It’s a Big Phar­ma team-up on­ly con­ceiv­able dur­ing the pan­dem­ic and comes af­ter Mer­ck de­cid­ed to bow out of the race for its own Covid-19 vac­cine af­ter mak­ing a very late en­try.

In late Jan­u­ary, Mer­ck dropped de­vel­op­ment of 2 vac­cines — V590 and V591 — af­ter tak­ing a look at Phase I da­ta that un­der­per­formed in terms of drum­ming up an im­mune re­sponse. Mer­ck didn’t re­veal full de­tails on both vac­cines’ fail­ing da­ta, but the FDA did in­di­cate it would con­sid­er ap­prov­ing any ef­fi­ca­cy above 50% for emer­gency use giv­en the enor­mous de­mand.

Now, with its ta­ble cleared, Mer­ck will piv­ot over to help­ing pro­duce J&J’s shot. Un­like the mR­NA vac­cines from Pfiz­er/BioN­Tech and Mod­er­na, J&J’s shot us­es re­com­bi­nant DNA de­liv­ered by an ade­n­ovirus vec­tor and can be stored at re­frig­er­at­ed temps for longer pe­ri­ods of time. The tech­nol­o­gy is old-school by mR­NA stan­dards, and Mer­ck should be fa­mil­iar with the pro­duc­tion de­mands giv­en its long stand­ing in the vac­cine field.

More­over, J&J’s shot on­ly re­quires one dose rather than the two-dose reg­i­men for Pfiz­er and Mod­er­na. That means even a mid-scale boost in pro­duc­tion could be a force mul­ti­pli­er in terms of pa­tients vac­ci­nat­ed.

The fi­nan­cial terms of the deal weren’t re­port­ed by the Post, and of­fi­cials said it would take about two months for Mer­ck’s fill-fin­ish plant to be up and run­ning. Get­ting the ac­tu­al pro­duc­tion fa­cil­i­ty on track would take a few ad­di­tion­al months af­ter that, an of­fi­cial said.

J&J’s shot earned the FDA’s trust with just 66% ef­fi­ca­cy in its piv­otal tri­al in pre­vent­ing mild and se­vere Covid-19. How­ev­er, in terms of pre­vent­ing hos­pi­tal­iza­tions and death, the shot per­formed much bet­ter, ef­fec­tive­ly show­ing 100% pro­tec­tion 28 days af­ter vac­ci­na­tion.

For a look at all End­points News coro­n­avirus sto­ries, check out our spe­cial news chan­nel.

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Novavax has had a busy month, filled with supply chain issues and manufacturing deals that have affected the rollout of its Covid-19 vaccine. Tuesday, the company announced updates to its leadership team.

CFO Greg Covino will step down from that role after just five months for personal reasons, the release said, but take on a new role as executive advisor. John Trizzino, current chief commercial officer and chief business officer, will take the CFO role over in the interim.

The FDA and CDC have jointly decided to stop administering J&J’s Covid-19 vaccine after reviewing data involving six reported US cases of a rare and severe type of blood clot in individuals after receiving the vaccine.

CDC will convene a meeting of its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Wednesday to further review these cases and assess their potential significance. “FDA will review that analysis as it also investigates these cases. Until that process is complete, we are recommending a pause in the use of this vaccine out of an abundance of caution,” Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research and Anne Schuchat, Principal Deputy Director of the CDC, said in a joint statement Tuesday morning.

As co-director of an experimental cellular therapy process development and manufacturing group at UCSF specializing in T cell therapies for autoimmune conditions, Jonathan Esensten has learned a lot about the challenges involved when his group hand-fashions a cell therapy. Esensten — who was a postdoc in Wendell Lim’s lab and counts the legendary Jeffrey Bluestone as a mentor — gives them all high marks at being great at what they do, but time and again there are variations in the treatments they construct.

There’s another unicorn in biotech land, as Benchling and its leading R&D cloud platform pull in a $200 million Series E to help scientists accelerate drug development. In doing so, the company hit a lofty $4 billion valuation — nearly five times what it was worth around this time last year, according to Forbes.

Despite the fact that drug development is becoming significantly more complex, the industry continues to run on paper, emails and spreadsheets, co-founder and CEO Sajith Wickramasekara said in a video on Benchling’s website. The MIT grad sought to change that by creating software that allows scientists to better track, model and forecast their work.

Amylyx is one of several companies looking to break through in the tough ALS field, and Wednesday they announced they’re moving forward with regulatory plans.

The Cambridge, MA-based biotech said they’re submitting a marketing application to the EMA for their AMX0035 program by the end of 2021. Wednesday’s news comes a few weeks after they revealed similar plans to move forward with Canadian health regulators by June 30.