Glax­o­SmithK­line bets an­oth­er $345M cash on Vir, ex­pand­ing Covid-19 part­ner­ship to flu, RSV and oth­er virus­es

Af­ter Glax­o­SmithK­line and Vir signed their $250 mil­lion part­ner­ship last April, they quick­ly ran in­to a prob­lem.

The two were sup­posed to be work­ing on CRISPR screens to iden­ti­fy po­ten­tial tar­gets for Covid-19, hu­man genes that could be ther­a­peu­ti­cal­ly knocked out with small mol­e­cules. But some of the genes the pair turned up for coro­n­avirus were the same ones Vir was find­ing for RSV and flu, pro­grams GSK didn’t have rights to. It forced the pair to walk an in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty tightrope. And it pre­vent­ed them from com­bin­ing da­ta sets and po­ten­tial­ly glean­ing larg­er in­sight.

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