Mer­ck has signed a re­search deal with 4D Phar­ma to use its Mi­croRX plat­form to turn liv­ing bac­te­ria in­to vac­cines.

The col­lab­o­ra­tion comes in the nascent field of “live bio­ther­a­peu­tics” – a term the FDA us­es to de­scribe liv­ing or­gan­isms, gen­er­al­ly bac­te­ria, used as med­i­cine. 4D Phar­ma, a small biotech based in Leeds, UK, builds its LBP by ex­tract­ing bac­te­ria from a healthy donor and putting it in a cap­sule pa­tients swal­low.

The deal al­lows 4D Phar­ma to cause New Jer­sey-based Mer­ck to pur­chase $5 mil­lion of or­di­nary 4D Phar­ma shares dur­ing the first year. There’s an undis­closed cash pay­ment to 4D, along with $347.5 mil­lion in op­tions hing­ing on de­vel­op­ment and reg­u­la­to­ry mile­stones, and roy­al­ties.

But there’s no word yet on what those in­di­ca­tions are. Or what pre­cise­ly these vac­cines are. 

Al­though 4D Phar­ma talks about de­vel­op­ing  “live bio­ther­a­peu­tic vac­cines” with Mer­ck, the FDA’s 2016 guid­ance on LBP clin­i­cal tri­als specif­i­cal­ly de­fines LBPs as some­thing that con­tains liv­ing or­gan­isms, is used to pre­vent or cure hu­man ail­ments, and “is not a vac­cine.”  

It ap­pears, though, that this is a new de­vel­op­ment and not an at­tempt by ei­ther com­pa­ny to re­brand the more es­tab­lished pre­ven­ta­tive LBP tar­gets. To its long list of pipeline tar­gets, the com­pa­ny very re­cent­ly – the Way­back Ma­chine on­ly lets us check as re­cent­ly as Ju­ly 15, when it was not yet there – added “MRx Vac­cines.” It ap­pears with the short­est line, and links to the mes­sage: “We have en­tered a re­search col­lab­o­ra­tion and op­tion agree­ment with MSD, util­is­ing the Mi­croRx plat­form to dis­cov­er and de­vel­op LBPs as nov­el vac­cines.”

The “Plat­form” por­tion of 4D’s pipeline

Click on the im­age to see the full-sized ver­sion

LBPs are cur­rent­ly be­ing in­ves­ti­gat­ed as a pre­ven­ta­tive treat­ment for bac­te­r­i­al vagi­nosis, necro­tiz­ing en­te­ro­col­i­tis, and al­ler­gic rhini­tis. 4D is cur­rent­ly in­volved in four clin­i­cal tri­als, study­ing Blau­tix in IBS, MRx0518 in com­bi­na­tion with Mer­ck’s Keytru­da on sol­id tu­mors and MRx0518 in a neoad­ju­vant set­ting for sol­id tu­mors, and MRx-4DP0004 for asth­ma.

Daria Hazu­da, Mer­ck’s VP of in­fec­tious dis­eases and vac­cines dis­cov­ery re­search added, “we hope to gain mean­ing­ful in­sights in­to the role for the host mi­cro­bio­me in mod­u­lat­ing the im­mune re­sponse and ul­ti­mate­ly pro­tec­tion con­ferred by vac­cines.”

The researcher behind base-editing is out with what some scientists are hailing as the biggest advancement in CRISPR technology since that 2016 breakthrough: “prime editing.” The new molecular gadget is capable of erasing any base pair and stenciling in another and cutting or adding long segments of DNA without breaking both strands of the helix.

David Liu, base editing pioneer and founder of Beam Therapeutics, published the findings in Nature alongside Andrew Anzalone. They estimated that the breakthrough “in principle” puts 89% of human diseases in purview — although experts cautioned that human therapies were a long way off.

For the past three years Frazier Healthcare Partners’ Bhaskar Chaudhuri has been carefully and quietly grooming Arcutis Therapeutics, a new dermatology play he co-founded to deliver topical formulations of well-known drugs. Now that the biotech is poised to enter Phase III, he’s being joined by a marquee syndicate for its $94.5 million Series C.

HBM Healthcare Investments, Vivo Capital, BlackRock, Omega Funds, Pivotal BioVentures, and Goldman Sachs jumped on board, joining Bain Capital Life Sciences, OrbiMed and RA Capital Management in backing Arcutis’ lead topical cream for plaque psoriasis.

The remedy for the most common side effect for one of the most common multiple sclerosis drugs is simple: aspirin.

Taking aspirin with Biogen’s Tecfidera will reduce the flush, a sometimes painful form of red skin irritation, many patients experiences. The problem is that the aspirin has to be taken at least 30 minutes before Tecfidera, turning a simple twice-a-day, one-dose oral drug into a staggered two-drug regimen.

Despite a head start, when Bristol-Myers Squibb and its pioneering checkpoint inhibitor Opdivo suffered a key lung cancer setback in 2016, they found themselves relegated to the backseat as Merck’s Keytruda seized the wheel on the road to immunotherapy stardom. Bristol-Myers has since suffered blow after blow in its quest to take a big slice of the lucrative market, peppered with some small successes. On Tuesday, the New Jersey drugmaker touted positive data from a Phase III open-label study in a bid to carve itself a piece of the frontline lung cancer market.