After nearly a year of public advocacy and often rancorous ethical debate, human challenge trials for Covid-19 vaccines are getting off the ground in London.

The UK government’s Covid-19 Vaccine Taskforce and the contract research firm Open Orphan announced today a £10 million ($13 million) plan to test experimental Covid-19 vaccines in volunteers who are intentionally exposed to the novel coronavirus. The studies, which won’t launch until early 2021, come after 9 months of debate over whether such studies were safe and would actually hasten vaccine development, and they follow a long history of researchers using challenge models to study other respiratory viruses, including flu and the coronaviruses that cause the common cold.

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GSK has a new slate of data to offer on its PD-1 inhibitor, Jemperli — data that the pharma giant hopes will cement one of the four drug approvals it’s expecting this year.

While Jemperli (dostarlimab) is already approved for a subset of patients with second-line endometrial cancer, GSK set out in the Phase III RUBY trial to test it as an earlier line of treatment while also enrolling a broader group of patients. In an interim analysis, Jemperli was shown to extend progression-free survival for both the subset and the overall trial population when added to chemotherapy.

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BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics has had a rocky road trying to get its ALS treatment through to the FDA, including a particularly difficult setback after the FDA slapped the company with a refusal to file (RTF) letter in November after it submitted its original BLA in September last year.

But there’s a glimmer of hope for BrainStorm’s ALS treatment, NurOwn – the FDA will hold an advisory committee meeting to discuss the company’s BLA for the treatment, the company announced today.

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A new spinout from Belgium’s argenx seeks to give new life to a candidate once in-licensed to J&J.

OncoVerity announced Monday afternoon that it had in-licensed cusatuzumab from argenx. The biotech also appointed two new C-suite executives and secured a $30 million Series A round.

CEO Max Colao joins OncoVerity after working as Aurinia’s commercial chief, and stints at Alexion and Amgen. New CMO Clay Smith has been associate chief of the University of Colorado’s hematology division.

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