→ Less than two months af­ter Ger­man biotech BioN­Tech raised a her­culean $325 mil­lion in an up­sized round of fi­nanc­ing — the Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion have signed a pact with the com­pa­ny, mak­ing an ini­tial eq­ui­ty in­vest­ment of $55 mil­lion to de­vel­op vac­cine and im­munother­a­py can­di­dates to pre­vent HIV and tu­ber­cu­lo­sis. To­tal fund­ing un­der the deal could hit $100 mil­lion, via po­ten­tial grant fund­ing from the foun­da­tion, BioN­Tech said on Wednes­day.

→ BeiGene, a pi­o­neer and dar­ling of the grow­ing US-Chi­na biotech crowd, was the sub­ject of a fe­ro­cious short re­port pub­lished by J Cap­i­tal on Thurs­day. Shares fell rough­ly 9% on both the Nas­daq $BGNE and the Hong Kong stock ex­change (06160) on al­le­ga­tions that the com­pa­ny faked sales of the Cel­gene drugs it’s in charge of mar­ket­ing in Chi­na, in­vest­ed in bo­gus man­u­fac­tur­ing sites, and over­spent on wages for R&D staff. Tim Mur­ray, au­thor of the re­port, fur­ther ac­cused ex­ecs of “pump­ing and dump­ing,” talk­ing up BeiGene’s stand­ing with Chi­nese drug reg­u­la­tors and po­ten­tial for its drugs while covert­ly sell­ing off their own stock.

In a state­ment to the HKEX, BeiGene called the al­le­ga­tions “in­ac­cu­rate, un­found­ed and mis­lead­ing” as well as “bla­tant­ly false.”

“From its in­cep­tion, BeiGene has op­er­at­ed with an un­wa­ver­ing com­mit­ment to com­pli­ance, ethics, and in­tegri­ty,” it wrote. “BeiGene re­mains fo­cused on its mis­sion to build a bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny that will pro­vide the high­est qual­i­ty ther­a­pies to the great­est num­ber of pa­tients around the world.”

→ No­var­tis $NVS is palm­ing off a Chi­na-based unit for $790 mil­lion yuan (about $110.5 mil­lion), ac­cord­ing to a Wednes­day re­port by Dow Jones. The plant, which was opened a decade ago, was sold to Chi­na’s Zhe­jiang Ji­uzhou, ex­clud­ing the Swiss drug­mak­er’s tech­nol­o­gy and drug-de­vel­op­ment as­sets. The ac­qui­si­tion will help Zhe­jiang Ji­uzhou ce­ment its po­si­tion as a strate­gic sup­pli­er to No­var­tis, not­ed the re­port.

As concerns rise around the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines, global attention is increasingly turning to the little, 33-year-old, productless, bankruptcy-flirting biotech that could: Novavax.

In the now 16-month race to develop and deploy Covid-19 vaccines, Novavax has at times seemed like the pandemic’s most unsuspecting frontrunner and at times like an overhyped also-ran. Although they started the pandemic with only enough cash to last 6 months, they leveraged old connections and believers into $2 billion and emerged last summer with data experts said surpassed Pfizer and Moderna. They unveiled plans to quickly scale to 2 billion doses. Then they couldn’t even make enough material to run their US trial and watched four other companies beat them to the finish line.

The FDA wrapped up its inspection of Emergent’s troubled vaccine manufacturing plant in Baltimore on Tuesday, after halting production there on Monday. By Wednesday morning, the agency already released a series of scathing observations on the cross contamination, sanitary issues and lack of staff training that caused the contract manufacturer to dispose of millions of AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine doses.

Although Thursday’s Senate health committee hearing was focused on how foreign countries and adversaries might be trying to steal or negatively influence biomedical research in the US, the only country mentioned by the senators and expert witnesses was China.

Committee chair Patty Murray (D-WA) made clear in her opening remarks that the US cannot “let the few instances of bad actors” overshadow the hard work of the many immigrant researchers in the US, many of which have won Nobel prizes for their work. But she also said, “There is more the NIH can be doing here.”

The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society has tapped 5 new early-stage projects to back with up to $10 million each in fresh investments. The 5 biotechs are:

— Caribou, headed by Rachel Haurwitz and co-founded by Jennifer Doudna, is working on next-gen, off-the-shelf CAR-Ts to replace the patient-derived cells now in use.

— The LLS supported NexImmune’s IPO, helping fund its work on nanoparticles that can gin up an immune response directed at cancer cells. The biotech has 2 projects now in Phase I trials.

Francesco De Rubertis made no secret of IPO plans for Centessa, his 10-in-1 legacy play. Barely two months later, the S-1 is in.

The hot-off-the-press filing depicts the same grand vision that the longtime VC touted when he did the rounds in February: Take the asset-centric mindset that he’s been preaching at Medicxi over the years, and roll up a bunch of biotech upstarts, with unrelated risk profiles, into 1 pharma company that can carry on the development at scale.