Health inequity in the US increasingly drew attention through the pandemic, with long-existing disparities exacerbated — and spurring fin,ancial support and promises of help from pharma companies. Now the Merck Foundation is taking a step further with a new fund to focus equity efforts specifically on cancer care.

The goal of the $20 million Alliance for Equity in Cancer Care, which debuted on Thursday, is to go beyond clinical interventions in cancer and drive much-needed surrounding support for underserved people and communities. The initiative includes grants to seven cancer centers, hospitals and researchers across the country, including Boston Medical Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center in Baton Rouge, LA, and the ASCO Foundation’s Conquer Cancer in Montana.

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Welcome back to Endpoints Weekly, your review of the week’s top biopharma headlines. Want this in your inbox every Saturday morning? Current Endpoints readers can visit their reader profile to add Endpoints Weekly. New to Endpoints? Sign up here.

I hope your weekend is off to a nice start, wherever you are reading this email. As for me, I’m trying to catch the tail of the Lunar New Year festivities.

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While mRNA took center stage at yesterday’s FDA vaccine advisory committee meeting, Novavax announced its plans to deliver an updated protein-based vaccine based on new guidance.

Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) members voted unanimously in favor of “harmonizing” Covid vaccine compositions, meaning all future vaccine recipients would receive a bivalent vaccine, regardless of whether they’ve gotten their primary series.

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When it comes to customer service to healthcare professionals, pharma companies’ overall average rating is, well, average. Its industry customer experience score of 59 is at the lower end of “good” (rated as scores from 51-75) in DT Consulting’s annual assessment out now.

Topping the list of individual pharma companies was UCB with a 66 score on the consultant’s proprietary “Customer Experience Quotient” or CXQ scale. Novo Nordisk and Gilead Sciences followed, tied for second at 65, while Boehringer Ingelheim and Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen tied for third with 64. Still, none of the top scores neared “excellent” territory of 76 or higher.

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Massachusetts-based iVexSol has secured funding to the tune of $23.8 million in its latest Series A round. The new investors include Bristol Myers Squibb, manufacturer Charles River Laboratories and Asahi Kasei Medical.

iVexSol is a manufacturer of lentiviral vectors (LVV), used in making gene therapies, and this latest round of fundraising brings its total Series A total over $39 million, which will be used to recruit more employees and bolster its technology.

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