→ Alex Zha­voronkov’s Hong Kong-based AI-shop In­sil­i­co Med­i­cine has been buzzing with the pub­li­ca­tion of da­ta in Na­ture, which showed its ma­chine learn­ing ap­proach helped iden­ti­fy po­ten­tial drugs as­so­ci­at­ed with a par­tic­u­lar tar­get in a swift 21 days. On Wednes­day, the com­pa­ny dis­closed that is has al­lied with Chi­na-based Jiang­su Chia Tai Feng­hai Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal Co in a deal worth up to $200 mil­lion — in­clud­ing an up­front pay­ment, as well as po­ten­tial mile­stone and roy­al­ty pay­ments.

The col­lab­o­ra­tion will fo­cus on two pro­grams to tack­le triple-neg­a­tive breast can­cer, us­ing an AI-en­abled plat­form for drug dis­cov­ery. Zha­voronkov said he was un­able to pro­vide more de­tail on the deal, but that he ex­pects the part­ner­ship to last about two years. “But we hope to ex­pand it be­cause, if his­to­ry is any in­di­ca­tion of the fu­ture, Chi­na is pro­gress­ing in drug dis­cov­ery,” he told End­points News.

A pla­toon of bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies have linked up with the emerg­ing crop of AI spe­cial­ists itch­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on how large datasets can be har­nessed to dri­ve new ther­a­pies in­to the clin­ic. Zha­voronkov is well con­nect­ed — last year he raised funds at the be­hest of Shang­hai high-fly­er WuXi AppTec, Sin­ga­pore’s Temasek, Pe­ter Dia­man­dis and Ju­ve­nes­cence. Last month, In­sil­i­co raised $37 mil­lion in its lat­est fund­ing round.

→ Af­ter star­tling the world with the claim that the ge­net­ic mu­ta­tion Chi­nese sci­en­tist Jiankui He at­tempt­ed to ed­it in em­bryos — lead­ing to the birth of twin girls — is as­so­ci­at­ed with a high­er risk of pre­ma­ture death, two UC Berke­ley re­searchers are re­tract­ing the pa­per. In a brief note, Na­ture wrote that Xinzhu Wei and Ras­mus Nielsen “have been made aware of a geno­typ­ing call­ing bias in the un­der­ly­ing UK Biobank da­ta from which the main re­sults of the study were drawn.” Fol­low­ing that ini­tial warn­ing from David Re­ich, the au­thors ran fur­ther analy­ses with dif­fer­ent data­bas­es and con­firmed that the cen­tral find­ing of the study about CCR5-∆32 was “the re­sult of this tech­ni­cal ar­ti­fact.”

→ Vivory­on Ther­a­peu­tics is of­fer­ing near­ly 37 mil­lion shares in a pub­lic of­fer­ing — hop­ing to gen­er­ate €30 mil­lion — to fund the Phase IIb de­vel­op­ment of its lead drug, PQ912, for Alzheimer’s dis­ease. The tri­al will be test­ing the drug in 250 pa­tients, with re­sults ex­pect­ed in 2022. 

→ Bay­er is ink­ing a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Japan’s largest na­tion­al re­search or­ga­ni­za­tion, RIKEN In­no­va­tion, to “joint­ly ex­plore po­ten­tial drug tar­gets, uti­lize ba­sic drug dis­cov­ery tech­nolo­gies as well as as­sess dis­ease mech­a­nisms.”

→ Bar­bara Davis Cen­ter for Di­a­betes-found­ed Im­munoMol­e­c­u­lar Ther­a­peu­tics has raised $10 mil­lion in Se­ries A fi­nanc­ing to ad­vance its HLA-tar­get­ed dis­cov­ery plat­form and to de­vel­op its lead drug can­di­date in type 1 di­a­betes. The round was co-led by the JDRF T1D Fund and Morn­ing­side Ven­tures, along with the Col­orado Uni­ver­si­ty Health­care In­no­va­tion Fund.

Five months after Enhertu received twin breakthrough therapy designations, AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo are one step closer to nabbing another approval for their potential blockbuster drug.

The companies announced Wednesday morning that their billion-dollar antibody-drug conjugate has received priority review for HER2 positive metastatic gastric cancer. Already approved in the US for third-line metastatic breast cancer patients that are HER2 positive, Enhertu’s gastric cancer PDUFA date is scheduled for the first quarter of 2021.

The White House and many Americans have pinned their hopes for defeating the Covid-19 pandemic on a vaccine being developed at “warp speed.” But some scientific experts warn they’re all expecting too much, too soon.

“Everyone thinks COVID-19 will go away with a vaccine,” said William Haseltine, chair and president of Access Health International, a foundation that advocates for affordable care.

Novartis reported that Zolgensma earned $291 million in Q3, which puts the SMA gene therapy squarely in the blockbuster category. That, in turn, is paying benefits to Regenxbio, which provided the NAV AAV9 vector used by Zolgensma.

The biotech $RGNX reported Tuesday morning that it is getting an $80 million milestone payment from Novartis, which now has earned more than $1 billion cumulatively from the new gene therapy franchise. And with large percentages of newborns now being screened for the rare, lethal ailment, the franchise can continue to grow.

A couple years after licensing Novimmune’s emapalumab and turning around a quick FDA OK, Stockholm-based Sobi is betting up to $1.2 billion for rights to another rare disease drug.

The company is shelling out $250 million upfront and adding up to $915 million in milestones for rights to develop and commercialize Apellis Pharmaceuticals’ drug pegcetacoplan outside the US. Together, the companies will see the systemic C3 therapy through five registrational trials in hematology, nephrology and neurology.