Advanced manufacturing techniques can be employed to help address some of the manufacturing and supply chain problems the US has seen during the Covid-19 pandemic, Stephen Hahn, FDA commissioner, and Anand Shah, FDA deputy commissioner for medical and scientific affairs, wrote in a blog post on the FDA website.

“The potential public health value of advanced manufacturing is even greater in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has highlighted the strain on supply chains and the need for adaptive manufacturing systems to accelerate the production of medical countermeasures,” Hahn and Shah wrote. “The FDA has established a strong regulatory foundation to support the uptake of advanced manufacturing, and COVID-19 provides the unique impetus to spur further advancement of medical manufacturing.”

Four former FDA commissioners have coalesced around a century-old treatment they believe can give the best weapon against Covid-19: Convalescent plasma.

Writing in The Washington Post, former FDA commissioners Mark McClellan, Margaret Hamburg, Robert Califf and Scott Gottlieb said that while more work needs to be done to prove it’s safe and effective, convalescent plasma was a “promising treatment” that “could help millions of patients with the novel coronavirus both here and abroad.” They warned, though, that for it to become an effective tool in the US’ Covid-19 response, a more “concerted effort” is needed to recruit donors and run trials.

As US Covid-19 deaths creep past 150,000 and officials stress the importance of contact tracing, the NIH’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) program has inked contracts totaling $248.7 million to expand testing capabilities.

The seven contracts, which were chosen “Shark Tank”-style from a pool of 100 proposals, are part of an effort to bump daily testing capacity to 2% of the country’s population by late summer or fall. That would be about 6 million people per day, compared to the current 520,000 to 823,000 tests being administered daily.

Eli Lilly and the NIH are about to start a first-of-its-kind trial that researchers and developers have talked about for months as a way of providing temporary immunity to the most at-risk populations.

Lilly announced this morning that it will start a 2,400-person trial with the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases to test whether its experimental Covid-19 neutralizing antibody can prevent people in nursing homes and assisted living facilities from developing the disease. The idea, known as passive immunity, is that rather than waiting on a vaccine to induce people to develop antibodies, doctors can give them lab-grown antibodies. Ideally, those antibodies will either attack the new SARS-CoV-2 infection, if the patient has recently been exposed, or persist in the blood for several weeks and prevent infection or disease for that period.

Merck, the latecomer to the Covid-19 vaccine race, said today that it will push its first candidate into the clinic this quarter and move the other one there by the end of the year.

They are likely going to be single-dose regimens, Merck noted, as opposed to the prime-boost approach being adopted in Phase III studies by Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca/Oxford.

For the first time since the company threw its name into the hat with one licensing deal and an acquisition, R&D chief Roger Perlmutter also offered his thoughts on how the frontrunners are doing, why he didn’t go with an mRNA approach despite a longstanding partnership with Moderna, and what gaps Merck’s programs might fill.