→ Blue­print Med­i­cines $BPMC has filed to raise $150 mil­lion in a new stock of­fer­ing. Most of the new mon­ey is be­ing ear­marked for up­com­ing clin­i­cal tri­als of its pipeline drugs. And the com­pa­ny says it will add to the $268 mil­lion al­ready in re­serves at the end of 2016, stretch­ing its run­way to the mid­dle of 2019.

→ Cam­bridge, MA-based Warp Dri­ve Bio has set up a dis­cov­ery deal with Glax­o­SmithK­line, cre­at­ing a cus­tom DNA-tagged SMART li­brary that GSK will build and screen against a set of ‘un­drug­gable’ tar­gets re­lat­ed to dis­eases of high un­met med­ical need. Among the Warp Dri­ve tar­gets are RAS, SHP2 and Cbl-b. “This unique col­lab­o­ra­tion with GSK of­fers an in­valu­able op­por­tu­ni­ty to com­bine two pow­er­ful plat­forms to cre­ate an un­prece­dent­ed li­brary of up to 200 mil­lion di­verse SMART com­pounds for the dis­cov­ery of lead chem­i­cal mat­ter against a set of cur­rent­ly-in­ac­ces­si­ble tar­gets,” said Alan Rig­by, Ph.D., chief sci­en­tif­ic of­fi­cer of Warp Dri­ve Bio.

→ There’s been a change at the helm of the em­bat­tled De­pomed. The com­pa­ny, un­der as­sault by an ac­tivist in­vestor, says CEO James Schoe­neck is out, re­placed by ex-Bay­er CEO Arthur Hig­gins. The switch comes with a shake­up of the board. Gavin Mo­linel­li, part­ner of Star­board, who’s been push­ing for change, says he’s sat­is­fied with the re­or­ga­ni­za­tion.

→ Acor­da says it’s mak­ing good progress with long-term safe­ty stud­ies of its Parkin­son’s drug CVT-301. “We are de­light­ed with these re­sults, and plan to move for­ward with our NDA fil­ing for CVT-301. These two stud­ies, which in­clude ap­prox­i­mate­ly 700 par­tic­i­pants, rep­re­sent the largest safe­ty data­base eval­u­at­ing long-term pul­monary func­tion in peo­ple with Parkin­son’s,” said Burkhard Blank, the CMO at Acor­da.

→ Ko­rea’s Sam­sung Bi­o­Log­ics has blitzed its way to a lead­ing spot in the emerg­ing biosim­i­lars mar­ket. And it’s been build­ing up its man­u­fac­tur­ing mus­cle with its pipeline. Now a top ex­ec says the com­pa­ny is look­ing to Eu­rope or the US for the site of its next big man­u­fac­tur­ing site.

The mRNA player Moderna is further cementing its presence on the African continent.

Moderna announced on Thursday that it has finalized an agreement with Kenya’s government to partner up and bring an mRNA manufacturing facility to the east African nation. The new facility aims to manufacture up to 500 million doses of vaccines annually. Moderna also said the new facility will have the ability to spike its production capabilities to respond to public health emergencies on the continent or globally.

In a first, Merck has secured a full approval for Keytruda in a tumor agnostic setting — as a treatment for any unresectable or metastatic solid tumors that are classified as microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) or mismatch repair deficient (dMMR).

The FDA granted Keytruda accelerated approval in this indication in 2017, and GSK’s Jemperli followed suit in 2021. But now it’s converted to a full approval for Keytruda. Before prescribing, doctors would have to make sure patients carry this biomarker, using an FDA-approved test.

ViiV Healthcare has teamed up with the UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool and three generic manufacturers to expand access to medicine that can prevent HIV.

ViiV and the Medicines Patent Pool jointly announced Thursday that the MPP signed sub-licensing agreements with Aurobindo, Cipla and Viatris to manufacture generics of a long-acting form of cabotegravir for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). As a result of the agreement, the manufacturers will be able to develop, manufacture and supply generic versions of cabotegravir LA in 90 countries — subject to regulatory approvals.