→ 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.

The EMA is putting EU member states on alert over the shortage of two drugs that counter heart attacks due to an uptick in demand.

On Friday, the EMA sent out a warning that two Boehringer Ingelheim drugs are experiencing a shortage: Actilyse and Metalyse. The drugs are used as emergency treatments for adults experiencing acute myocardial infarction, or a heart attack, by dissolving blood clots that have formed in the blood vessels.

Fujifilm’s CDMO arm, Fujifilm Diosynth, has been on a roll this month as the company has recently broken ground on a major project in Europe and it appears to be keeping up the momentum.

Fujifilm Diosynth announced that it has kicked off an expansion project for its microbial manufacturing facility at its campus in the town of Billingham, UK, in the northeast of England.

The 20,000 square-foot, £400 million ($435 million) expansion will add clean rooms, purification suites and a packing area along with more space for the manufacturing itself.

Back in April, Amgen said it was encouraged by the solicitor general’s anticipated review of its Supreme Court petition to rehear a Repatha patent case. They’re likely much less optimistic about the outcome now.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in a recent 27-page brief that Amgen’s arguments “lack merit and further review is not warranted.”

The case traces back to a suit filed in 2014 against Sanofi and Regeneron’s Praluent, which ended up beating Amgen’s PCSK9 blockbuster Repatha to market by a month just a year later.

At Klick Health’s first Ideas Exchange conference with biotech and pharma industry insiders since before the pandemic began, it was no surprise many conversations included Covid topics. Yet while vaccines and treatments were discussed, so too were the effects on drug development, federal responses, health inequities — and what to do now and next.

George Yancopoulos, chief scientist and cofounder of Regeneron, opened the conference responding to a question from Acorda CEO Ron Cohen about the spotlight on the industry during Covid and some of the “flak” biopharma has taken in the past.