After a 7-year stretch building the commercial team at Sarepta, longtime drug salesman Bo Cumbo is jumping to the entrepreneurial side of the business, taking the helm of a startup that’s got several deep-pocket investors. And he’s not just bringing his experience in selling drugs.

He tells me that when he told Sarepta CEO Doug Ingram about it, his boss got excited about the venture and opted to jump in with a $15 million investment from Sarepta to add to the launch money, alongside 3 of the busiest investors in biotech.

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With its FDA pitch on the Alzheimer’s drug aducanumab hanging perilously close to disaster, Biogen is rolling the dice on a $3.1 billion deal that brings in commercial rights to one of the other spotlight neuro drugs in late-stage development — after it already failed its first Phase III.

The big biotech has turned to Sage Therapeutics for its latest deal, close to a year after the crushing failure of Sage-217, now dubbed zuranolone, in the MOUNTAIN study.

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Pascal Soriot spent the long Thanksgiving weekend digging AstraZeneca out of a hole, promising to put an end to the questions around its interim Phase III vaccine data by conducting a new study while going to regulators with a large part of what it already has.

AstraZeneca and its partners at Oxford had initially touted high-level results from two studies conducted in the UK and Brazil as positive. But the enthusiasm was soon shadowed by confusion as observers probed into how the highest, 90% efficacy was seen in a dosing regimen given to a small group of volunteers due to an error. Among a larger cohort given the intended shots, the vaccine was only 62% effective, a rate that would’ve been respectable had Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna not posted efficacy rates of 94%, 95% for their mRNA candidates. And many weren’t sure what to make of the average 70% number that AstraZeneca ran in headlines.

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Nearly a year ago, as the coronavirus emerged in China, the NIH and four major companies bet on an unproven genetic technology as the best tool for developing a vaccine to stem the outbreak. Today, a second such vaccine is heading to the FDA.

Moderna said Monday that they will request an emergency use authorization from the FDA after a final analysis showed their mRNA vaccine was 94.1% effective at preventing symptomatic Covid-19. The data confirm the results from an interim analysis and matches efficacy Pfizer and BioNTech showed in a Phase III study, setting the biotech up to potentially nab one of the first two Covid-19 vaccine OKs.

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Bob Nelsen spent his pandemic spring in his Seattle home, talking on the phone with Luciana Borio, the scientist who used to run pandemic preparedness on the National Security Council, and fuming with her about the dire state of American manufacturing.

Companies were rushing to develop vaccines and antibodies for the new virus, but even if they succeeded, there was no immediate supply chain or infrastructure to mass-produce them in a way that could make a dent in the outbreak.

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In mid-August, as Kodak’s $765 million government-backed push into drug manufacturing slowly fell apart in national headlines, Ginkgo Bioworks CEO Jason Kelly got a message from his company’s government liaison: HHS wanted to know if they, too, might want a loan.

The government’s decision to lend Kodak three quarters of a billion dollars raised eyebrows because Kodak had never made drugs before. But Ginkgo, while not a manufacturing company, had spent the last decade refining new ways to produce materials inside cells and building automated facilities across Boston.

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