FDA an­nounced to­day that doc­tors and phar­ma­cists can now pre­scribe Paxlovid to pa­tients with­out a pos­i­tive test for Covid-19.

CDER Di­rec­tor Pa­trizia Cavaz­zoni reis­sued Paxlovid’s au­tho­riza­tion let­ter Wednes­day, say­ing it has re­vised the au­tho­riza­tion to “no longer re­quire pos­i­tive re­sults of di­rect SARS-CoV-2 vi­ral test­ing.” The EUA now re­quires in­stead that adults and kids 12 years of age and old­er have a “cur­rent di­ag­no­sis of mild-to-mod­er­ate COVID-19.”

Walid Gel­lad

Walid Gel­lad, di­rec­tor of the Cen­ter for Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal Pol­i­cy and Pre­scrib­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh, told End­points News that “Paxlovid is right now the on­ly good op­tion for out­pa­tient treat­ment of Covid, and the last thing we want to do is give it to peo­ple who don’t have Covid just for con­ve­nience.”

“I can un­der­stand the de­sire to get peo­ple at high risk the treat­ment, but it has to be very rare that some­one tests neg­a­tive and is un­able to get a PCR or test again the next day and then get treat­ed. It seems this is a pol­i­cy that will ad­dress a mi­nus­cule slice of un­der­use and lead to a large in­crease in overuse,” Gel­lad added.

Paxlovid re­sis­tance has been doc­u­ment­ed in the months since the ther­a­py was giv­en emer­gency au­tho­riza­tion back in De­cem­ber 2021. Sci­ence writer and chemist Derek Lowe said last sum­mer that re­sis­tance to the an­tivi­ral was a ques­tion of not if, but when — point­ing to mu­ta­tions in the coro­n­avirus, spe­cif­ic places in the pro­tein se­quence that could the­o­ret­i­cal­ly lead to vi­ral se­quences, and ref­er­enc­ing a num­ber of po­ten­tial mu­ta­tion sites that could be fea­si­ble in the re­al world.

Er­ic Topol, di­rec­tor of the Scripps Re­search Trans­la­tion­al In­sti­tute, told End­points at the time that “the like­li­hood of re­sis­tance is high,” adding that “Many Mpro [main pro­tease] func­tion mu­ta­tions, oc­cur­ring nat­u­ral­ly, have al­ready been iden­ti­fied.”

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, Mer­ck’s Lagevrio — al­so known as mol­nupi­ravir — had its au­tho­riza­tion changed Wednes­day, al­low­ing adults to be pre­scribed the now much less­er-used an­tivi­ral with­out a pos­i­tive test. This is af­ter the FDA moved last year to re­strict who can pre­scribe the an­tivi­ral to on­ly “tra­di­tion­al pre­scribers (e.g. physi­cians, ad­vanced prac­tice reg­is­tered nurs­es, and physi­cian as­sis­tants),” the FDA told End­points back in Ju­ly.

The mRNA player Moderna is further cementing its presence on the African continent.

Moderna announced on Thursday that it has finalized an agreement with Kenya’s government to partner up and bring an mRNA manufacturing facility to the east African nation. The new facility aims to manufacture up to 500 million doses of vaccines annually. Moderna also said the new facility will have the ability to spike its production capabilities to respond to public health emergencies on the continent or globally.

When Vigil Neuroscience filed its IPO papers in late 2021, the biotech revealed that the FDA had just cleared its Phase I trial — but with a partial clinical hold that limited dosing to under a certain level.

More than a year later, the FDA has lifted the hold.

Vigil is now free to dose VGL101, an antibody targeting TREM2, at levels higher than 20 mg/kg in its ongoing and future clinical trials in patients with adult-onset leukoencephalopathy with axonal spheroids and pigmented glia (ALSP), an inherited condition that affects the brain and spinal cord.

Catalent will be manufacturing a low-cost version of the opioid overdose treatment naloxone as part of a contract with Harm Reduction Therapeutics.

Catalent plans to manufacture the treatment at its facility in Morrisville, NC. No financial details on the deal were disclosed.

Harm Reduction was granted priority review status for the NDA on its spray last year. The company has been working on a naloxone product since 2017. It is anticipating approval in July of this year and a US launch in early 2024.

Last year, South African-based vaccine manufacturer Aspen Pharmacare was facing reports that it had not received a single order for its manufactured Covid-19 shots and that manufacturing lines were sitting idle. But now the vaccine producer is looking to turn things around.

Aspen’s disclosure of its financial results in March unveiled that manufacturing revenue had decreased by 12% to R 603 million ($33.8 million), which Lorraine Hill, Aspen Group’s COO, said is attributable to lower Covid vaccine sales.

Thermo Fisher Scientific is putting down more roots in the Bay Area.

The manufacturer opened the doors to a new cell therapy manufacturing facility next to the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center’s Mission Bay campus and on the university’s campus.

UCSF and Thermo Fisher have had a partnership since 2021, with the new site focusing on manufacturing cell therapeutics for certain cancers, including glioblastoma and multiple myeloma. The new site plans to use Thermo Fisher’s expertise in manufacturing services to help UCSF accelerate the development of cell therapies and eventually get them into the clinic, said Dan Herring, the general manager of cell therapy services at Thermo Fisher, in an interview with Endpoints News.

Dallas-based biotech Nanoscope Therapeutics unveiled Phase II results on its gene therapy for a rare eye disease Thursday morning.

In the RESTORE trial, 18 patients with retinitis pigmentosa got a gene therapy called MCO-010 while nine got placebo. On a vision test called the MLYMT, the treatment group had a one-point greater change over one year in their score compared to the placebo group, the primary endpoint of the study. However, the 95% confidence interval was 0.0 to 3.0, meaning the result was not statistically significant. The p-value was not provided.

In a first, Merck has secured a full approval for Keytruda in a tumor agnostic setting — as a treatment for any unresectable or metastatic solid tumors that are classified as microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) or mismatch repair deficient (dMMR).

The FDA granted Keytruda accelerated approval in this indication in 2017, and GSK’s Jemperli followed suit in 2021. But now it’s converted to a full approval for Keytruda. Before prescribing, doctors would have to make sure patients carry this biomarker, using an FDA-approved test.