Fol­low­ing the suit of As­traZeneca last Feb­ru­ary, Boehringer In­gel­heim will team up with a lead­ing R&D hub in Hong Kong to seed biotechs.

Where­as As­traZeneca fo­cused on can­cer drugs and di­ag­nos­tics, the Ger­man gi­ant will work with Hong Kong Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Parks on in­cu­bat­ing in­fec­tious dis­ease and im­munol­o­gy drug de­vel­op­ers.

HK­STP and Boehringer, through its ven­ture arm, will sup­port the up­starts with up to $6 mil­lion HK (about $600,000 USD) each to bankroll ear­ly-stage op­er­a­tions and clin­i­cal tri­als, said Grace Lau, head of HK­STP’s in­sti­tute for trans­la­tion­al re­search, in a state­ment.

The fo­cus is on ear­ly-stage star­tups and uni­ver­si­ty spin­offs that are en­ter­ing the R&D stage. Lo­cal and glob­al star­tups are able to ap­ply.

The Hong Kong part­ner will pro­vide busi­ness de­vel­op­ment ex­per­tise, men­tor­ship and in­vest­ment ini­tia­tives, such as help­ing with fi­nan­cial sub­si­dies and up­front grants. The group will al­so lend guid­ance on com­mer­cial­iza­tion, man­u­fac­tur­ing, scal­ing-up and mar­ket­ing strate­gies.

Boehringer will lend in­vest­ment in­sight and pro­vide ac­cess to its fund­ing net­work.

The pair kept de­tails slim on the length of the part­ner­ship and how many biotechs they look to build. More than 150 biotechs are al­ready part of HK­STP, the group says, which is a three­fold in­crease in the past five years. The rapid rise is part of the gov­ern­ment’s in­vest­ment in­to bio­med­ical tech­nol­o­gy with the in­fu­sion of $10 bil­lion HK ($1.27 bil­lion USD) ded­i­cat­ed to­ward life and health tech.

The rise has been so strong that HK­STP CEO Al­bert Wong claims Hong Kong is the world’s sec­ond largest fundrais­ing hub for biotech, ce­ment­ing its mark as the largest in Asia.

“Now we’re thrilled to see that the bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­dus­try is pick­ing up rapid­ly in the Guang­dong–Hong Kong–Macau Greater Bay Area, it’s a great op­por­tu­ni­ty for us to part­ner with HK­STP to de­vel­op the lo­cal ecosys­tem, and fur­ther en­hance Chi­na’s dual-cir­cu­la­tion scheme,” Boehringer Chi­na CEO and pres­i­dent Fe­lix Gutsche said in a state­ment. “We hope to of­fer our con­tin­u­ous sup­port to more home-grown in­no­va­tions to be rec­og­nized on the glob­al mar­ket and even­tu­al­ly ben­e­fit the pa­tients world­wide.”

Fledg­ling biotechs in­volved in the pro­gram can al­so tap in­to HK­STP’s 11,000-re­searcher tal­ent pool.

Since losing a controversial court case over orphan drug exclusivity last year, the FDA’s Office of Orphan Products Development has remained entirely silent on orphan exclusivity for any product approved since last November, leaving many sponsors in limbo on what to expect.

That silence means that for more than 70 orphan-designated indications for more than 60 products, OOPD has issued no public determination on the seven-year orphan exclusivity in the Orange Book, and no new listings of orphan exclusivity appear in OOPD’s searchable database, as highlighted recently by George O’Brien, a partner in Mayer Brown’s Washington, DC office.

The chikungunya virus met its match in Valneva’s vaccine candidate, VLA1553, according to data from an antibody persistence trial released today.

The trial found that 99% of 363 participants retained neutralizing antibodies 12 months after a single dose of vaccine in the company’s earlier, larger Phase III trial, called VLA1553-301. The participants from the long-term study will continue to be monitored for at least five years.

As the global biologics market is expected to hit nearly the half-trillion-dollar mark this year, new JAMA research points to the importance of timely biosimilar entry, particularly as fewer biosimilars are entering the US than in Europe, and as monthly treatment costs for biosimilars were “substantially higher” in the US compared with Germany and Switzerland.

Among the three countries, biosimilar market share at launch was highest in Germany, but increased at the fastest rate in the US, the authors from the University of Zurich’s Institute of Law wrote in JAMA Network Open today.