→ Af­ter kick­ing off a Phase III tri­al test­ing its NM­DA drug in sui­ci­dal bipo­lar de­pres­sion, Neu­roRx has se­cured ac­cess to around $95 mil­lion (HKD$750 mil­lion) to com­plete the pro­gram and fund the man­u­fac­tur­ing ac­tiv­i­ties. New York-based GEM Glob­al Yield has com­mit­ted to pro­vide the cap­i­tal — through pur­chas­ing shares — once Neu­roRx gets list­ed on a pub­lic mar­ket. The biotech, which was found­ed by bio­phar­ma vet Jonathan Javitt and psy­chi­a­try re­searcher Daniel Javitt (the broth­ers are the CEO and chair­man of the sci­en­tif­ic ad­vi­so­ry board, re­spec­tive­ly), can draw as much or as lit­tle of the agreed amount with­in a 30-month term. The plan is to de­vel­op NRX-101 in both the US, where it has a break­through ther­a­py des­ig­na­tion, and Chi­na.

→ Don­ald Trump is fi­nal­ly as­sem­bling his Pres­i­dent’s Coun­cil of Ad­vi­sors on Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy, al­most two years af­ter the group last met in Jan­u­ary 2017 just be­fore his in­au­gu­ra­tion. There’s one biotech ex­ec­u­tive among the first sev­en out of 16 mem­bers named to the group: Sharon Hrynkow, SVP for Med­ical Af­fairs at Cy­clo Ther­a­peu­tics, who had a back­ground in the NIH. Oth­ers on the com­mit­tee in­clude Cather­ine Bessant, CTO for Bank of Amer­i­ca; Dario Gil, di­rec­tor of IBM Re­search; Fisk John­son III, CEO of clean­ing prod­ucts com­pa­ny SC John­son & Son; At­ti­ganal Sreer­am, se­nior vice pres­i­dent of re­search at Dow; Shane Wall, CTO and head of HP Labs; and UC Berke­ley pro­fes­sor Bir­git­ta Wha­ley.

A plant located in Wrexham, Wales that is packing the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine into vials was surrounded by a bomb squad after officials called police to report a suspicious package.

The alert caused a partial evacuation of the plant, the BBC was among those to report Wednesday. The owner of the plant, British drugmaker Wockhardt UK, said it was cooperating with local authorities and that there were no reports of any injuries.

Hours before President Biden’s Covid-19 team gave their first virtual press conference, the famed AIDS researcher David Ho delivered concerning news in a new pre-print: SARS-CoV-2 B.1.351, the variant that emerged in South Africa, is “markedly more resistant” to antibodies from convalescent plasma and vaccinated individuals.

The news for several monoclonal antibodies, including Eli Lilly’s bamlanivimab, was even worse: Their ability to neutralize was “completely or markedly abolished,” Ho wrote. Lilly’s antibody cocktail, which was just shown to dramatically reduce the risk of hospitalizations or death, also became far less potent.