“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.

Astellas and Pantherna have expanded their November 2021 pact surrounding the latter’s mRNA platform to include a new target organ, the duo announced Tuesday morning, though they did not specify what that target is.

German biotech Pantherna is home to two platform technologies — one that designs mRNAs for non-vaccine therapies and another that designs LNPs. Astellas and Pantherna’s deal appears to mainly revolve around the first platform, which Astellas said it is using to research direct reprogramming, or turning cells from one kind into another without an intermediate stem cell phase.

Takeda on Tuesday morning made an announcement that almost 3,000 people with the rare disease known as hypoparathyroidism were fearing.

Due to unresolved supply issues and manufacturing woes, Takeda said it will cut its losses and discontinue its hypoparathyroidism drug, known as Natpara (parathyroid hormone), halting all manufacturing of the drug by the end of 2024.

The decision to not re-commercialize Natpara will be a blow to not only the 2,400 people who were awaiting supplies of their reliable injection since 2019, but also the additional nearly 400 people who were accessing the drugs via the company’s Special Use Program as Takeda sought to resolve these manufacturing issues over the past five years.