→ Mayo Clin­ic is open­ing up its sprawl­ing clin­i­cal data­base to nfer­ence, the Cam­bridge, MA-based AI start­up it’s long part­nered with and re­cent­ly backed in a $60 mil­lion round. The project aims to dig­i­tize 25 mil­lion tis­sue slides with­in the next 2 to 2.5 years, Fierce­Biotech re­port­ed, in ad­di­tion to an­no­tat­ing, link­ing and tag­ging writ­ten physi­cian notes. Af­ter sort­ing through the da­ta, nfer­ence will use the plat­form to iden­ti­fy new tar­gets and bio­mark­ers as well as ap­ply it in clin­i­cal tri­al re­cruit­ment and re­al-world ev­i­dence gen­er­a­tion.

→ Cypri­um Ther­a­peu­tics, one of the star­tups in­cu­bat­ed by Fortress Biotech, has been grant­ed rare pe­di­atric dis­ease des­ig­na­tion by the FDA for cop­per his­tid­i­nate, al­so re­ferred to as CUTX-101, for the treat­ment of Menkes dis­ease. The drug — which is de­signed to boost blood and brain cop­per lev­els — has al­so gained or­phan and fast track sta­tus.

→ In an ex­pan­sion of its glob­al foot­print, WuXi Bi­o­log­ics has ac­quired a drug prod­uct man­u­fac­tur­ing plant from Bay­er. The fa­cil­i­ty, lo­cat­ed in Lev­erkusen, Ger­many, will al­so serve as a back-up pro­duc­tion site for Bay­er’s Ko­val­try, a he­mo­phil­ia A treat­ment, once WuXi takes over.

→ South Ko­rea’s Cell­tri­on has plans to build a new plant in Chi­na to man­u­fac­ture its biosim­i­lars as it ad­vances a Rem­i­cade copy­cat in the coun­try. Chair­man Jung-jin Seo said at the JP Mor­gan con­fer­ence that the fa­cil­i­ty will have a pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty of 120,000 liters, ac­cord­ing to Yon­hap News Agency.

→ No­var­tis, J&J, Eli Lil­ly, Pfiz­er and GSK are join­ing the Gates Foun­da­tion on a phil­an­thropic com­mu­ni­ty-based pri­ma­ry health­care ini­tia­tive in six African coun­tries led by two char­i­ties. The drug­mak­ers will “con­tribute dis­ease-spe­cif­ic ex­per­tise and ex­pe­ri­ence in the dis­cov­ery and de­vel­op­ment of new tools, which will sup­ple­ment the com­mu­ni­ty health work­er mod­els.” They would al­so each con­tribute $1.5 mil­lion to the project.

The Endpoints News team is continuing to track IPO filings for 2021, and we’ve designed a new tracker page for the effort.

Check it out here: Biopharma IPOs 2021 from Endpoints News

You’ll be able to find all the biotechs that have filed and priced so far this year, sortable by quarter and listed by newest first. As of the time of publishing on Feb. 25, there have already been 16 biotechs debuting on Nasdaq so far this year, with an additional four having filed their S-1 paperwork.

Seeking to build on the 20 clinical-stage drug candidates already in its pipeline, California oncology and autoimmune disease-focused biotech Xencor announced on Thursday a partnership with nearby UCLA and the university’s Technology Development Group.

The two will collaborate to develop novel therapeutic antibodies, pairing novel targets proposed by scientists at UCLA with Xencor’s XmAb technology platforms that engineer monoclonal antibodies to create new protein structures. No financial terms of the agreement were disclosed, but any selected drug candidates resulting from the partnership will use a framework of “predefined terms to enter sponsored research agreements and potential license agreements,” the organizations said.

S&P Global has taken a look at the dominant forces shaping the pharma market and come to the conclusion that there will be more downgrades than upgrades in 2021 — the 8th straight year of steady decline.

But it’s not all bad news. Some things are looking up, and there’s still plenty of money to be made in an industry that enjoys a 30% to 40% profit margin, once you factor in steep R&D expenses.

In the search for a better Covid-19 therapeutic, GlaxoSmithKline and Vir have partnered up on two antibodies they hope have a chance. GSK is also testing its own in-house antibody, and early results may have shut the door on its widespread use.

A combination of GSK’s monoclonal antibody otilimab plus standard of care couldn’t best standard of care alone in preventing death and respiratory failure in hospitalized Covid-19 patients after 28 days, according to data from the Phase IIa OSCAR study unveiled Thursday.