As the coro­n­avirus orig­i­nat­ing out of Wuhan spreads to South Ko­rea, Italy and Iran, stok­ing al­ready in­tense fears of a pan­dem­ic, Glax­o­SmithK­line has found an­oth­er pair of trust­ed hands to place its ad­ju­vant sys­tem. Chi­na’s Clover Bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals will add the ad­ju­vant to its pre­clin­i­cal, pro­tein-based vac­cine can­di­date against SARS-CoV-2.

Thomas Breuer

Clover, which is based in the in­land city of Cheng­du, boasts of a plat­form dubbed Trimer-Tag that pro­duces co­va­lent­ly-trimer­ized fu­sion pro­teins. Its can­di­date, COVID-19 S-Trimer, re­sem­bles the vi­ral spike (S)-pro­tein found in the virus.

Thomas Breuer, CMO of GSK Vac­cines, praised the re­search as “cut­ting edge” and their pro­pos­al promis­ing.

Ear­li­er this month the phar­ma gi­ant put out word that it’s mak­ing its plat­form avail­able to a net­work of in­ves­ti­ga­tors af­fil­i­at­ed with CEPI, the Coali­tion for Epi­dem­ic Pre­pared­ness In­no­va­tion in Oslo.

“The use of an ad­ju­vant is of par­tic­u­lar im­por­tance in a pan­dem­ic sit­u­a­tion since it may re­duce the amount of vac­cine pro­tein re­quired per dose, al­low­ing more vac­cine dos­es to be pro­duced and there­fore con­tribut­ing to pro­tect more peo­ple,” Breuer said in a state­ment.

There’s no time­line on when their can­di­date might be ready for a clin­i­cal tri­al, let alone be­com­ing com­mer­cial­ly avail­able. But Clover said it has “one of the largest in-house, com­mer­cial-scale cGMP bio­man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties in Chi­na,” which would al­low it to rapid­ly scale up pro­duc­tion of a new vac­cine.

Where­as doc­tors in Chi­na and around the world have had some suc­cess treat­ing Covid-19 pa­tients with un­proven but seem­ing­ly ef­fec­tive ther­a­pies — from HIV drugs to a malar­ia med to oth­er ex­per­i­men­tal an­tivi­rals — the plight of Wuhan has demon­strat­ed how the sheer size of the pa­tient pop­u­la­tion can over­whelm med­ical sys­tems and leave many be­hind. These fears are ex­ac­er­bat­ed by the up­dates pour­ing in from Iran, where 50 new deaths have been re­port­ed in one city, as well as Ko­rea, whose case­load has surged to over 800 in a mat­ter of days. Vac­cines re­main the Holy Grail.

Aside from the more tra­di­tion­al ap­proach, CEPI is al­so back­ing new ef­forts to de­vel­op an mR­NA vac­cine, which would hi­jack the cell’s ma­chin­ery and coax the body to make its own anti­gens that then kick up an im­mune re­sponse. Both CEPI part­ner Cure­Vac and Mod­er­na, work­ing with the NIH, have in­di­cat­ed that they will be ready for hu­man test­ing ear­ly this sum­mer — a much faster pace al­beit for a much new­er tech­nol­o­gy.

The abil­i­ty to mass man­u­fac­ture any suc­cess­ful mR­NA vac­cines that emerge, though, still re­mains in ques­tion and the NIH has plead­ed with large drug­mak­ers to step up.

The average level of investment required for a biotech start-up to succeed is increasing every year, elevating the pressure even further on venture capital to make smart financial investments. Financial investment alone, however, does not always guarantee that exciting innovations can be transformed into real businesses that make a meaningful difference to patients.

Beyond just capital

At Astellas Venture Management (AVM) – a wholly-owned venture capital organization within Astellas, headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area – capital is just one of the ingredients we offer to add value to our biotechnology investments and partnerships. We generally take a strategic investor approach for companies in our invested portfolio, providing access to expertise, technology and/or resources in addition to the injection of finance. An equity investment from AVM can include access to Astellas’ research and development (R&D) capabilities and expertise, and a global network of partner academic institutions and biotechnology companies, to help advance and accelerate the start-up’s innovation.

Unum $UMRX is working its way through a survival plan of sorts.

After getting hit with a trio of FDA holds in its brief public history and triggering its second pivot to a new lead drug program while laying off 60% of the staff, the troubled penny stock biotech Unum Therapeutics has hatched new plans to secure financial backing while lining up a go-forward strategy for the company.

First, Lincoln Park Capital Fund has agreed to buy up to $25 million of the long-suffering stock, as Unum directs. And the executive team — led by CEO Chuck Wilson — has put everything on the table for consideration: a sale, acquisition, merger, licensing deal, you name it. The ACTR707 program, meanwhile, is being formally wrapped up — their second failed lead program.