Hav­ing made loud and clear its call for new re­search on vac­cines that can tack­le fu­ture pan­demics, the NIH is shed­ding light on some of the projects it’s fund­ing.

The Na­tion­al In­sti­tute of Al­ler­gy and In­fec­tious Dis­eases (NI­AID) has award­ed around $36.3 mil­lion to three aca­d­e­m­ic groups that are work­ing on de­vel­op­ing “pan-coro­n­avirus vac­cines” — in­oc­u­la­tions that can pro­tect against a di­verse fam­i­ly of coro­n­avirus­es, es­pe­cial­ly the vo­ra­cious ones like SARS-CoV-2.

Among the three awards, sci­en­tists will use the fund­ing to de­sign and test vac­cine con­structs, as well as map out the full spec­trum of im­mune re­spons­es to coro­n­avirus­es (in­clud­ing SARS-CoV-2 vari­ants).

“These new awards are de­signed to look ahead and pre­pare for the next gen­er­a­tion of coro­n­avirus­es with pan­dem­ic po­ten­tial,” NI­AID di­rec­tor An­tho­ny Fau­ci said in a state­ment.

The NI­AID’s Di­vi­sion of Mi­cro­bi­ol­o­gy and In­fec­tious Dis­eases and Di­vi­sion of Al­ler­gy, Im­munol­o­gy, and Trans­plan­ta­tion had put out an emer­gency awards no­tice of spe­cial in­ter­est back in No­vem­ber 2020 while many Covid-19 vac­cines were still un­der de­vel­op­ment. Be­sides, the agency added, vac­cines that can of­fer broad im­mu­ni­ty against dan­ger­ous pathogens like MERS and SARS are still sore­ly need­ed.

Of the three projects award­ed grants, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin-Madi­son team will be chas­ing a vac­cine can­di­date it calls Pan­Cor­Vac; the group from Brigham and Women’s Hos­pi­tal in Boston will aim to dis­cov­er durable pan-coro­n­avirus im­mu­ni­ty; and a crew out of Duke Uni­ver­si­ty will be test­ing its pan-be­ta­coro­n­avirus vac­cine.

All com­prise mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary tal­ent and will in­cor­po­rate re­search on “vi­rol­o­gy and im­munol­o­gy, im­muno­gen de­sign, and in­no­v­a­tive vac­cine and ad­ju­vant plat­forms and tech­nolo­gies,” the NIH added.

The NIH ex­pects to be hand­ing out an­oth­er batch of awards next year for the same pur­pose.

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.

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.

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.