Ef­forts are un­der­way to de­vel­op a new chal­lenge virus for SARS-CoV-2, and a British CRO is mak­ing its case.

Open Or­phan said Mon­day that its sub­sidiary hVI­VO signed a con­tract with Im­pe­r­i­al Col­lege Lon­don to man­u­fac­ture such a chal­lenge virus. The con­tract is worth £3 mil­lion and hVI­VO will de­vel­op the virus based on new emerg­ing Covid-19 vari­ants of con­cern. The com­pa­ny hopes to then use the virus in fu­ture chal­lenge stud­ies.

Open Or­phan added the project will be­gin im­me­di­ate­ly, and man­u­fac­tur­ing is ex­pect­ed to be com­plete by the end of the year.

The CRO feels hVI­VO is well-suit­ed to the task be­cause of its past ex­pe­ri­ence work­ing on chal­lenge virus­es for the flu, RSV and the com­mon cold, in ad­di­tion to an ear­li­er ver­sion of SARS-CoV-2. That orig­i­nal Covid-19 strain is be­ing used in a chal­lenge study in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the UK gov­ern­ment.

“The avail­abil­i­ty of a vari­ant SARS-CoV-2 virus will great­ly ex­pand the util­i­ty of the SARS-CoV-2 chal­lenge mod­el and al­low us to an­swer a wider range of im­por­tant sci­en­tif­ic ques­tions to aid con­trol of the pan­dem­ic as well as fa­cil­i­tate fur­ther test­ing of vac­cines de­signed against Covid-19,” — hVI­VO CSO An­drew Catch­pole said in a state­ment.

Dutch agency says Zol­gens­ma price should be cut in half

No­var­tis’ Zol­gens­ma drug for spinal mus­cu­lar at­ro­phy is no­to­ri­ous for be­ing the most ex­pen­sive med­i­cine in the world at about $2.1 mil­lion. But the Dutch are try­ing to change that.

The Zor­gin­sti­tu­ut, the na­tion­al health care in­sti­tute of The Nether­lands, is push­ing to slash Zol­gens­ma’s price in half, per a state­ment re­leased Mon­day. The in­sti­tute not­ed that the price point does not re­flect the drug’s ef­fec­tive­ness, say­ing there is too lit­tle ev­i­dence the drug works to cost its cur­rent price.

It has rec­om­mend­ed that the Dutch gov­ern­ment not cov­er the costs of the med­i­cine un­less this price cut is met.

“The Zor­gin­sti­tu­ut en­sures that our care is and re­mains good and af­ford­able, all this to on­ly spend our mon­ey for health­care on valu­able treat­ments that are known to ac­tu­al­ly work,” the agency said in a state­ment. “We ul­ti­mate­ly make these com­pli­cat­ed but nec­es­sary choic­es for and on be­half of 17 mil­lion Dutch peo­ple, so that every­one con­tin­ues to have ac­cess to good and af­ford­able care in the fu­ture.”

Fenlai Tan still gets chills thinking about the darkest day of his life.

Three out of eight lung cancer patients who received a tyrosine kinase inhibitor developed by his company, Betta Pharma, died in the span of a month. Tan, the chief medical officer, was summoned to Peking Union Medical College Hospital, where the head of the clinical trial department told him that the trial investigators would be conducting an autopsy to see if the patients had died of the disease — they were all very sick by the time they enrolled — or of interstitial lung disease, a deadly side effect tied to the TKI class that’s been reported in Japan.

From the very beginning at SciNeuro, CEO Min Li has envisioned a mix of licensing deals and scientific efforts to replicate the breakout success of China’s oncology companies in neuroscience.

The GlaxoSmithKline vet has now inked a deal that somewhat straddles the line between the two strategies.

Teaming up with Mabylon out of Zurich, SciNeuro is now looking to test the hypothesis that the human immune system can play a role in fighting neurodegenerative diseases by discovering and developing human autoantibodies against neurological “targets of mutual interests.” The new partners offered TAR DNA binding protein-43 (TDP-43) and apolipoprotein E (APOE), which are linked to ALS and Alzheimer’s, as examples.

BioNTech’s first mRNA-based vaccine site in Africa will call Rwanda home, and construction is set to start in mid-2022, the company announced Tuesday at a public health forum.

The German company signed a memorandum of understanding, after a meeting between Rwanda’s Minister of Health, Daniel Ngamije, Senegal’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Aïssata Tall Sall, and senior BioNTech officials. Construction plans have been finalized, and assets have been ordered. The agreement will help bring end-to-end manufacturing to Africa, and as many as several hundred million doses of vaccines per year, though initial production will be more modest.