→ As­traZeneca has won a pri­or­i­ty re­view for its an­ti-CD22 ther­a­py mox­e­tu­momab for hairy cell leukemia. The phar­ma gi­ant can now ex­pect a de­ci­sion on third-line use in the third quar­ter, mark­ing an­oth­er prospec­tive ad­vance for its crit­i­cal­ly im­por­tant on­col­o­gy pipeline.

→ With ma­jor help from Fra­zier Health­care Part­ners, a stealthy gene ther­a­py com­pa­ny from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia has se­cured $9.29 mil­lion in in­vest­ment. Gene ther­a­py pi­o­neer James Wil­son co-reg­is­tered the com­pa­ny in 2016, the Philadel­phia In­quir­er notes, but has since been re­placed on the board by Penn med­ical school vice dean Kevin Ma­honey. Kr­ish­na Polu, a for­mer Cy­tomX chief med­ical of­fi­cer who joined Fra­zier as an en­tre­pre­neur in res­i­dence, is the CEO. Sev­er­al Fra­zier ex­ecs, in­clud­ing Patrick Heron and Tadata­ka Tama­da, are al­so on the board.

→ Switzer­land’s Glycemi­con an­nounced to­day that af­ter a sec­ond clos­ing, it has raised a to­tal of $5.28 mil­lion (CHF 5.05 mil­lion) to ad­vance cat and hu­man stud­ies of its neu­traceu­ti­cals. The biotech is de­vel­op­ing a pipeline of nov­el food prod­ucts that man­ages pre­di­a­betes, the “gray area” be­tween nor­mal blood sug­ar lev­els and di­a­betes, as well as weight.

Steve Holtzman was awoken by a 1 a.m. call from a doctor at Duke University asking if he could put some pigs on a plane and fly them from Ohio to North Carolina that day. A motorcyclist had gotten into a horrific crash, the doctor explained. He believed the pigs’ livers, sutured onto the patient’s skin like an external filter, might be able to tide the young man over until a donor liver became available.

Pfizer will present its case to the FDA’s vaccine adcomm next week, seeking authorization for a lower-dose version of its Covid-19 vaccine for kids ages 5 through 12, which the Biden administration said will likely begin rolling out early next month.

Two primary doses of the 10 µg vaccine (the dose for those ages 12 and up is 30 μg) given 3 weeks apart in this group of children “have shown a favorable safety and tolerability profile, robust immune responses against all variants of concern including Delta, and vaccine efficacy of 90.7% against laboratory-confirmed symptomatic COVID-19,” the company said in briefing documents ahead of next Tuesday’s meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

David Livingston, the Dana-Farber/Harvard Med scientist who helped shine a light on some of the key molecular drivers of breast and ovarian cancer, died unexpectedly last Sunday.

One of the senior leaders at Dana-Farber during his nearly half century of work there, Livingston was credited with shedding light on the genes that regulate cell growth, with insights into inherited BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations that helped lay the scientific foundation for targeted therapies and earlier detection that have transformed the field.