Gilead quash­es mi­cro­cap biotech's hope of part­ner­ing on oral Covid-19 drug

Gilead is call­ing it quits on a two-year-old project to de­vel­op an oral for­mu­la­tion of its Covid-19 an­tivi­ral remde­sivir, its biotech coun­ter­parts at Mati­nas Bio­Phar­ma re­port­ed.

In­stead, Gilead told Mati­nas that it’s fo­cus­ing on an in­ter­nal can­di­date — an oral nu­cle­o­side pro­drug of remde­sivir.

In late 2020, Mati­nas scored a col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Na­tion­al In­sti­tute of Al­ler­gy and In­fec­tious Dis­eases, of­fer­ing its lipid nanocrys­tal, or LNC, plat­form to see if it can re­for­mu­late remde­sivir, which is typ­i­cal­ly giv­en as an in­tra­venous in­fu­sion, as an oral med­ica­tion.

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