“Se­in­feld” ac­tor Ja­son Alexan­der takes a turn as a guardian an­gel in a new Sanofi cam­paign to en­cour­age flu vac­ci­na­tions.

Known for his fun­ny, off­beat George Costan­za char­ac­ter, Alexan­der takes on a sweet­er though still hu­mor­ous role pro­tect­ing his charge from “life’s lit­tle dis­as­ters.” As he catch­es falling pi­geon poop in his hat, swaps ex­pired milk and fends off in­sects, he com­pares his guardian an­gel role to flu im­mu­niza­tion.

“Pro­tec­tion like this doesn’t have to be su­per­nat­ur­al. Be­cause just like me, a flu shot can help pre­vent nasty com­pli­ca­tions from the flu — like pneu­mo­nia, heart at­tack and stroke,” he says in the on­line video.

The Sanofi aware­ness cam­paign called “Not To­day, Flu” in part­ner­ship with the Amer­i­can Nurs­es As­so­ci­a­tion is aimed at in­creas­ing flu vac­ci­na­tions in what is ex­pect­ed to be a dif­fi­cult and po­ten­tial­ly longer flu sea­son.

The 2021 fall in­fluen­za sea­son was mut­ed by self-im­posed so­cial dis­tanc­ing be­cause of the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic. How­ev­er, a late resur­gence through June, along with a big uptick in 2022 flu cas­es in the south­ern half of the world, has of­fi­cials con­cerned about the just-be­gin­ning sea­son north of the Equa­tor.

Ken Pauli­no

“We need to en­sure that there’s a good pub­lic health re­sponse out there to get pa­tients and in­di­vid­u­als im­mu­nized — and put the fo­cus back on get­ting flu shots on an an­nu­al ba­sis in do­ing our part to pre­vent a po­ten­tial­ly bad in­fluen­za sea­son com­ing up,” said Ken Pauli­no, Sanofi’s head of the adult vac­cines busi­ness in the US.

The CDC is rec­om­mend­ing flu vac­ci­na­tions this year for every­one six months and old­er dur­ing Sep­tem­ber and Oc­to­ber, sim­i­lar to its pre­vi­ous guid­ance. How­ev­er, it added a spe­cif­ic rec­om­men­da­tion this year for peo­ple ages 65 and old­er to re­ceive one of the three Flu­zone, Flublok or Flu­ad high­er-dose or ad­ju­vant­ed vac­cines. Sanofi makes both Flu­zone and Flublok.

The “Not To­day, Flu” dig­i­tal cam­paign in­cludes a ded­i­cat­ed web­site with re­sources such as a lo­cal flu vac­cine lo­ca­tor, along with me­dia in­ter­views by Alexan­der and so­cial me­dia posts on Face­book, Twit­ter, In­sta­gram and Tik­Tok with the cam­paign Tik­Tok han­dle@not­to­dayflu.

Span­ish-lan­guage ver­sions of the cam­paign are al­so run­ning along with a bilin­gual me­dia tour and part­ner­ships with Span­ish-speak­ing in­flu­encers to ad­dress “on­go­ing flu dis­par­i­ties in racial and eth­nic mi­nor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ties,” Sanofi said.

Eli Lilly has succeeded in its attempt to get the first non-covalent version of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase, or BTK, inhibitors to market, pushing it past rival Merck.

The FDA gave an accelerated nod to Lilly’s daily oral med, to be sold as Jaypirca, for patients with relapsed or refractory mantle cell lymphoma.

The agency’s green light, disclosed by the Indianapolis Big Pharma on Friday afternoon, catapults Lilly into a field dominated by covalent BTK inhibitors, which includes AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson’s Imbruvica, AstraZeneca’s Calquence and BeiGene’s Brukinsa.

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

The vote marks an effort to clear up confusion around varying formulations and dosing schedules for current primary series and booster vaccines, as well as “get closer to the strains that are circulating,” according to committee member Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The CDMO arm of one of South Korea’s largest conglomerates has posted its year-end results and plans for 2023, which include new construction.

Samsung Biologics netted north of KRW 3 trillion ($2.4 billion) in 2022 revenue and an operating profit of KRW 983.6 billion ($799 million), which the company touted on Friday as “record-high earnings.” The revenue boost was 55% compared to 2021.

Novartis’ sickle cell drug, approved in 2019 and branded as Adakveo, has failed an ongoing Phase III, according to preliminary results.

The Swiss pharma giant unveiled early data from the ongoing STAND Phase III study on Friday, saying that crizanlizumab showed no statistically significant difference between the drug at two different dose levels compared to placebo in annualized rates of vaso-occlusive crises that lead to a healthcare visit over the first year since being randomized into the trial.