→ Dana-Far­ber is lend­ing a hand to lit­tle On­coSec’s nascent ef­fort to de­vel­op CAR-T ther­a­pies for sol­id tu­mor can­cers. The San Diego biotech has worked out an ex­clu­sive li­cens­ing deal with Wayne Maras­co — an ex­pert in an­ti­body en­gi­neer­ing — to ap­ply his method of link­ing two sin­gle-chain vari­able frag­ment (scFv) in a bis­pe­cif­ic CAR-T such that the T cells are on­ly ac­ti­vat­ed when both tar­gets are en­gaged, there­by lim­it­ing off-tu­mor tox­i­c­i­ty. On­coSec’s fi­nan­cial con­tri­bu­tion in the re­search, which in­volves test­ing the ex­per­i­men­tal treat­ment so­lo and in com­bi­na­tion with Ta­vo in triple-neg­a­tive breast can­cer, will be “mod­est” and spread over sev­er­al years, CEO Daniel O’Con­nor said.

→ Af­ter win­ning the FDA nod for low blood platelet count (throm­bo­cy­tope­nia) in adults with chron­ic liv­er dis­ease (CLD) who are sched­uled to un­der­go a med­ical or den­tal pro­ce­dure, the la­bel of Do­va Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal’s Doptelet on Thurs­day was ex­pand­ed to in­clude pa­tients with chron­ic im­mune throm­bo­cy­tope­nia (ITP) who have had an in­suf­fi­cient re­sponse to a pre­vi­ous treat­ment. The com­pa­ny’s shares $DO­VA leapt about 27.5% to $13.50 in morn­ing trad­ing. The FDA’s en­dorse­ment comes about a week af­ter Eu­ro­pean reg­u­la­tors al­so backed the drug for use in se­vere throm­bo­cy­tope­nia in adult pa­tients with CLD who are sched­uled to un­der­go an in­va­sive pro­ce­dure. Mean­while, late-stage da­ta from a study eval­u­at­ing the drug’s use in chemother­a­py-in­duced throm­bo­cy­tope­nia are ex­pect­ed in the first half of 2020.

→ The re­cent­ly-pub­lic Ver­ri­ca Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals‘ $VR­CA ex­per­i­men­tal drug, VP-102, has cleared a mid-stage study in pa­tients with com­mon warts. The drug’s “ef­fi­ca­cy and tol­er­a­bil­i­ty has been fur­ther con­firmed with the pos­i­tive Phase II COVE-1 tri­al in com­mon warts, and is now de-risked in an ad­di­tion­al in­di­ca­tion. We be­lieve this pro­vides ad­di­tion­al (and not mod­eled) up­side for VR­CA as our val­u­a­tion tar­gets are based pure­ly on VP-102 in mol­lus­cum con­ta­gio­sum which re­mains on track for a po­ten­tial H2:2020 launch,” Cowen an­a­lysts wrote in a note. The com­pa­ny said it is on track to sub­mit an ap­pli­ca­tion to mar­ket the drug for pa­tients with mol­lus­cum con­ta­gio­sum — a vi­ral skin in­fec­tion some­times called wa­ter warts — lat­er this year.

Gilead is still some days away from turning the card on its first round of data on remdesivir’s ability to fight severe cases of Covid-19, but the big biotech is ramping up an emergency supply of a million courses of therapy as it starts free distribution of the drug to tens of thousands of patients under their compassionate use and expanded access program as well as clinical trials.

In his latest open letter posted over the weekend, Gilead CEO Dan O’Day outlined how the company has been successful in cutting production time on remdesivir while repurposing some of their own facilities and turning to contract manufacturers to build a near-term supply of 1.5 million doses. They are still working on efficacy and dosing, but that supply could cover 140,000 courses of treatment. That supply, he added, would be more widely available following a potential approval.

Developing new drugs is incredibly hard. That’s why, despite superhuman efforts from the industry, we’re still looking at 12-18 months minimum before we can realistically hope for a vaccine for Covid-19, and probably months before there’s a proven viable drug treatment.

But our increasing ability to begin to industrialize the drug discovery and development process through an engineering approach means that we have more hope for speeding up this process than ever before — and not just to defeat coronavirus, but to benefit the development of all new medicines in the future.