→ GSK CEO Em­ma Walm­s­ley has ral­lied to­geth­er with some of the UK’s most suc­cess­ful busi­ness­women to high­light the pay dis­crim­i­na­tion they face in com­par­i­son to their male coun­ter­parts in the cam­paign #MeToo­Pay. The web­site lament­ed the frus­tra­tions of the women, stat­ing, “we’re frus­trat­ed to still read sto­ries about women not get­ting the pay they de­serve. Women should not be paid less than men to do ex­act­ly the same job. It’s just wrong.”

Walm­s­ley’s pay­check is one of the low­est in the in­dus­try — last year earn­ing a $1.3 mil­lion raise with her to­tal re­mu­ner­a­tion be­ing $7.67 mil­lion — trail­ing be­hind her male peers.

→ Al­most a month af­ter Christo­pher Starr co-founder Monopar Ther­a­peu­tics an­nounced the terms for a $40 mil­lion IPO, the com­pa­ny is now post­pon­ing it, cit­ing mar­ket con­di­tions. The com­pa­ny had filed to of­fer 4.4 mil­lion shares at the price range of $8 to $10 and planned to list un­der the tick­er $MN­PR.

→ VIVUS has paid down $48.6 mil­lion of its Se­nior Se­cured Notes due in 2024. CEO of VIVUS, John Amos, said: “The $48.6 mil­lion re­pay­ment an­nounced to­day is the first of these steps and will re­sult in a net sav­ings of in­ter­est of $10.5 mil­lion over the re­main­ing term of the loan.” In ad­di­tion, the com­pa­ny an­nounced the de­par­ture of two of their ex­ecs — pres­i­dent Ken Suh and COO Scott Oehrlein.

→ Months af­ter Ve­rastem nabbed ap­proval for its PI3K drug du­velis­ib (Copik­tra), the com­pa­ny re­ceived more good news this morn­ing with the se­cur­ing of or­phan des­ig­na­tion for the drug for the treat­ment of T-Cell lym­phoma. Cur­rent­ly, Copik­tra is ap­proved for the treat­ment of chron­ic lym­pho­cyt­ic leukemia/small lym­pho­cyt­ic lym­phoma (CLL/SLL) af­ter at least 2 pri­or ther­a­pies and ac­cel­er­at­ed ap­proval in fol­lic­u­lar lym­phoma (FL) af­ter at least 2 pri­or sys­temic ther­a­pies in the US.

A month after word first broke of the Trump Administration’s plan to rapidly accelerate the development and production of a Covid-19 vaccine, the White House has selected the five vaccine candidates they consider most likely to succeed, The New York Times reported.

Most of the names in the plan, known as Operation Warp Speed, will come as little surprise to those who have watched the last four months of vaccine developments: Moderna, which was the first vaccine to reach humans and is now the furthest along of any US effort; J&J, which has not gone into trials but received around $500 million in funding from BARDA earlier this year; the joint AstraZeneca-Oxford venture which was granted $1.2 billion from BARDA two weeks ago; Pfizer, which has been working with the mRNA biotech BioNTech; and Merck, which just entered the race and expects to put their two vaccine candidates into humans later this year.

There haven’t been a lot of big venture rounds for biotech companies looking to run a Phase II study in Alzheimer’s.

The field has been a disaster over the past decade. Amyloid didn’t pan out as a target — going down in a litany of Phase III failures — and is now making its last stand at Biogen. Tau is a comer, but when you look around and all you see is destruction, the idea of backing a startup trying to find complex cocktails to swing the course of this devilishly complicated memory-wasting disease would daunt the pluckiest investors.

In 2011, GlaxoSmithKline’s Benlysta became the first biologic to win approval for lupus patients. Nine years on, the British drugmaker has unveiled detailed positive results from a study testing the drug in lupus patients with associated kidney disease — a post-marketing requirement from the initial FDA approval.

Lupus is a drug developer’s nightmare. In the last six decades, there has been just one FDA approval (Benlysta), with the field resembling a graveyard in recent years with a string of failures including UCB and Biogen’s late-stage flop, as well as defeats in Xencor and Sanofi’s programs. One of the main reasons the success has eluded researchers is because lupus, akin to cancer, is not just one disease — it really is a disease of many diseases, noted Al Roy, executive director of Lupus Clinical Investigators Network, an initiative of New York-based Lupus Research Alliance that claims it is the world’s leading private funder of lupus research, in an interview.

Data on remdesivir — the first drug shown to benefit Covid-19 patients in a randomized, controlled trial setting — may be murky, but its maker Gilead could reap billions from the sales of the failed Ebola therapy, according to an estimate by a prominent Wall Street analyst. However, the forecast, which is based on a $5,000-per-course US price tag, triggered the ire of one top drug price expert.