Mount­ing a pre­lim­i­nary ef­fort to catch up with oth­er phar­ma gi­ants in the on­colyt­ic virus space, As­traZeneca has found a part­ner in France’s Trans­gene.

In the deal, the biotech — which is al­ready al­lied with Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb and Pfiz­er/Mer­ck KGaA on com­bi­na­tion pro­grams with its in-house ther­a­peu­tic vac­cines — will come up with five new armed on­colyt­ic vac­cinia virus can­di­dates. As­traZeneca is start­ing small with $10 mil­lion up­front and just $3 mil­lion in pre­clin­i­cal suc­cess mile­stones, but promis­es an undis­closed li­cense fee for each clin­i­cal can­di­date they ul­ti­mate­ly de­cide to co-de­vel­op.

Jean-Charles So­ria

The phar­ma gi­ant $AZN will al­so be able to choose the trans­genes to be en­cod­ed with­in the virus, a key ad­di­tion that pro­vides added fire­pow­er to the im­mune sys­tem against the tu­mor.

Long rec­og­nized as a tool to di­rect­ly kill can­cer cells, on­colyt­ic virus­es gained trac­tion in re­cent years af­ter re­search sug­gests that by burst­ing can­cer cells and re­leas­ing anti­gens with­in, they can al­so trig­ger an im­mune re­sponse. That makes them a po­tent im­munother­a­pies on its own as well as an ide­al pair­ing agent for the next gen­er­a­tion of I/O com­bos.

As­traZeneca first got its hands on an on­colyt­ic virus in 2015 when it inked a li­cens­ing agree­ment with Om­nis Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals (now Vyr­i­ad), but it told Bio­Cen­tu­ry that “there are cur­rent­ly no on­go­ing AZ-spon­sored clin­i­cal tri­als of the can­di­date.”

Jean-Charles So­ria, SVP of As­traZeneca’s new­ly named on­col­o­gy unit, added they have “an ex­cit­ing port­fo­lio of mol­e­cules that we be­lieve may aug­ment on­colyt­ic virus ac­tiv­i­ty.”

Oth­er big play­ers such as Mer­ck, J&J, Pfiz­er and Boehringer have each bagged or seed­ed their own on­colyt­ic virus projects on the foot­steps of Am­gen’s T Vec, along­side biotech play­ers like PsiOxus, un­der­scor­ing the mo­men­tum of the next wave.

Mean­while, Trans­gene will con­tin­ue plough­ing on its in-house pipeline and promis­es to send a few more drugs to the clin­ic in 2020.

Medical animation has in recent years become an increasingly important tool for conveying niche information to a varied audience, particularly to those audiences without expertise in the specialist area. Science programmes today, for example, have moved from the piece-to-camera of the university professor explaining how a complex disease mechanism works, to actually showing the viewer first-hand what it might look like to shrink ourselves down to the size of an ant’s foot, and travel inside the human body to witness these processes in action. Effectively communicating a complex disease pathophysiology, or the novel mechanism of action of a new drug, can be complex. This is especially difficult when the audience domain knowledge is limited or non-existent. Medical animation can help with this communication challenge in several ways.
Improved accessibility to visualisation
Visualisation is a core component of our ability to understand a concept. Ask 10 people to visualise an apple, and each will come up with a slightly different image, some apples smaller than others, some more round, some with bites taken. Acceptable, you say, we can move on to the next part of the story. Now ask 10 people to visualise how HIV’s capsid protein gets arranged into the hexamers and pentamers that form the viral capsid that holds HIV’s genetic material. This request may pose a challenge even to someone with some virology knowledge, and it is that inability to effectively visualise what is going on that holds us back from fully understanding the rest of the story. So how does medical animation help us to overcome this visualisation challenge?

As a potentially powerful flu season looms, so does a big test for Roche and its new flu drug, Xofluza. The Swiss giant just got a small boost in advance of that test as the FDA expanded Xofluza’s indication to include patients at high risk of developing flu-related complications.

Xofluza (baloxavir marboxil) was approved last October in the US, the first landmark flu drug approval in 20 years and a much-needed green light for a company that had watched its leading flu drug Tamiflu get eaten alive by generics. Like its predecessor, the pill offered a reduction in flu symptoms but not a cure.

The first-ever Ebola vaccine is on the precipice of approval after the European Medicine’s Agency (EMA) backed the Merck product in this week’s roster of recommendations.

The drugmaker $MRK began developing the vaccine, christened Ervebo, during the West African outbreak that occurred between 2014 and 2016, killing more than 11,000.

The current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has shown case fatality rates of approximately 67%, the agency estimated. Earlier this year, the WHO declared the outbreak — which so far has infected more than 3,000 people — a public health emergency of international concern.