Operation Warp Speed has already handed out 4 of what they once said would be 3-5 major contracts to develop Covid-19 vaccines, but administration officials indicated Monday that more would be on their way.

“The slate is not closed,”  a senior HHS official said on a call with reporters. “We’ve invested in four … but the slate is not closed.”

At the same time, the official indicated that Warp Speed would continue to focus on three technologies: mRNA, viral vectors and protein subunits. That leaves the door open for a wide range of platforms, notably including both of Merck’s vaccine candidates — one of which has already received BARDA funding — and one of Sanofi’s candidates. It appears to preclude, though, the potential for Inovio and Vaxart, among certain other small developers that have hyped their ties to the Trump administration, to be included.

Just four months after scoring its first cancer drug approval in a decade, Sanofi is staying on the oncology offensive.

The French pharma is planning to accelerate the development of potential treatments, partnering with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in a five-year collaboration. By combining Sanofi’s pipeline with MD Anderson’s top-notch clinical trial program in oncology, the pair will launch biomarker-driven clinical studies to better understand which drug cocktails can effectively curb cancer progression.

Cytokinetics’ ALS programs may have seen better days, but its cardiovascular division has attracted well-backed partners, including Amgen and Royalty Pharma, who, in 2017 paid $90 million in exchange for a 4.5% royalty on their lead heart drug.

Now a Chinese drugmaker and a major investor are signing onto their second cardiovascular candidate, an experimental drug known as CK-274 and designed to treat hypertrophic cardiomyopathies — genetic conditions that cause heart muscles to become abnormally and potentially dangerously thick. Ji Xing Pharmaceuticals will pay Cytokinetics $25 million upfront for the rights to commercialize the drug in China and certain neighboring regions, along with $200 million in potential milestones.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s push to raise $4 billion for his blank check company, Pershing Square Tontine Holdings, is casting a spotlight on the SPACs. And amid a historic SPAC boom, biotechs are setting several records on what some observers say is shaping up to be a third major track — besides IPO and M&A — to go public.

“SPACs were approximately 3% of the IPO market back in 2014, now they are almost 35% of all new listings,” Jay Heller, the Nasdaq’s head of capital markets, told Endpoints News.