→ 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.

Following the Supreme Court’s historic decision on Friday to overturn Americans’ constitutional right to an abortion after almost 50 years, Attorney General Merrick Garland sought to somewhat reassure women that states will not be able to ban the prescription drug sometimes used for abortions.

Following the decision, the New England Journal of Medicine also published an editorial strongly condemning the reversal, saying it “serves American families poorly, putting their health, safety, finances, and futures at risk.”

Despite whispers of a busy year for M&A, deal activity in the pharma space is actually down 30% on a semi-annualized basis, according to PwC’s latest report on deal activity. But don’t rule out larger deals in the second half of the year, the consultants said.

PwC pharmaceutical and life sciences consulting solutions leader Glenn Hunzinger expects to see Big Pharma companies picking up earlier stage companies to try and fill pipeline gaps ahead of a slew of big patent cliffs. Though a bear market continues to maul the biotech sector, Hunzinger said recent deals indicate that pharma companies are still paying above current trading prices.

The story of Amryt Pharma’s candidate for the genetic skin condition epidermolysis bullosa, or EB, will soon enter another chapter.

After the Irish drugmaker’s candidate, dubbed Oleogel-S10 and marketed as Filsuvez, was handed a CRL earlier this year, the company announced in a press release that it plans to submit a formal dispute resolution request for the company’s NDA for Oleogel-S10.

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis made a name for himself in the 2020 election cycle as the darling of the pharma industry, accepting hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions, even from the likes of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.

Those contributions have led Tillis to attempt to re-write patent laws in pharma’s favor, a move which failed to gain steam in 2019, and request for a third time since January that the FDA should help stop “the false narrative that patent protections are to blame for high drug prices.”