Roche is mak­ing its first bet on an an­tivi­ral against Covid-19 in style, shelling out $350 mil­lion in cash to grab ex-US rights.

The drug comes from Atea Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, the 7-year-old biotech cre­at­ed by Phar­mas­set co-founder Jean-Pierre Som­ma­dos­si, which es­sen­tial­ly re­brand­ed it­self as a Covid-19 fight­er in May when it closed a whop­ping $215 mil­lion ven­ture round. Over a dozen in­vestors bought in, in­clud­ing mar­quee names like Bain Cap­i­tal and RA Cap­i­tal.

That mon­ey is fund­ing a Phase II clin­i­cal tri­al for AT-527 in hos­pi­tal­ized pa­tients with mod­er­ate Covid-19, with a glob­al Phase III in out­pa­tients to fol­low in ear­ly 2021. Then there are plans for an­oth­er Phase III in the post-ex­po­sure pro­phy­lax­is set­ting.

Tap­ping in­to Roche’s de­vel­op­ment and man­u­fac­tur­ing prowess al­lows Atea to do this at scale, said Som­ma­dos­si, the com­pa­ny’s pres­i­dent and CEO.

A nu­cleotide pro­drug, AT-527 be­longs to the same class as Gilead’s au­tho­rized remde­sivir and the ex­per­i­men­tal drug MK-4482 (for­mer­ly EI­DD-2801), which Mer­ck is now de­vel­op­ing with Ridge­back Bio­ther­a­peu­tics. By in­ter­fer­ing with vi­ral RNA poly­merase, it’s de­signed to in­hib­it repli­ca­tion of SARS-CoV-2.

While remde­sivir is cur­rent­ly on­ly avail­able through in­tra­venous in­fu­sion — Gilead is al­so de­vel­op­ing an in­haled ver­sion — Atea boasts of hav­ing an oral op­tion that can be pro­duced quick­ly.

Af­ter an ef­fort to re­pur­pose the IL-6 an­ti­body Actem­ra all but flopped, Roche be­gan build­ing a port­fo­lio of ex­per­i­men­tal treat­ments, start­ing with Re­gen­eron’s an­ti­body cock­tail. As with Atea, Roche bagged the rest-of-world rights, but in­stead of pay­ing an up­front of­fered man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pac­i­ty and fund­ing for clin­i­cal stud­ies.

Bill An­der­son

REGN-COV-2, now a well-known pro­gram thanks to a high-pro­file pa­tient in Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, is be­ing test­ed as both a pre­ven­tion and treat­ment.

“The on­go­ing com­plex­i­ties of COVID-19 re­quire mul­ti­ple lines of de­fence,” Roche Phar­ma CEO Bill An­der­son said in a state­ment. “By join­ing forces with Atea, we hope to of­fer an ad­di­tion­al treat­ment op­tion for hos­pi­talised and non-hos­pi­talised COVID-19 pa­tients, and pro­vide im­por­tant re­lief for hos­pi­tal in­fra­struc­tures dur­ing a glob­al pan­dem­ic.”

For a look at all End­points News coro­n­avirus sto­ries, check out our spe­cial news chan­nel.

A month and a half after becoming the experimental treatment of choice for a newly diagnosed president, Regeneron’s antibody cocktail has received emergency use authorization from the FDA. It will be used to treat non-hospitalized Covid-19 patients who are at high-risk of progressing.

Although the Rgeneron drug is not the first antibody treatment authorized by the FDA, the news comes as a significant milestone for a company and a treatment scientists have watched closely since the outbreak began.

Two months after Legend Biotech made the startling disclosure that founder and then-CEO Frank Zhang was placed under “residential surveillance,” its parent company revealed that he’s been formally arrested.

Zhang — who, since founding GenScript 18 years ago, has taken the CRO public and groomed Legend Biotech in-house until the J&J-partnered CAR-T player was mature enough for its own Nasdaq listing — is severing his final ties with both. He is resigning as board chair/non-executive director of GenScript and director of Legend.

Eiger BioPharmaceuticals $EIGR has received an FDA OK for a drug Merck licensed to them at no cost — and now reportedly plans to charge a level consistent with other ultra-rare disease medicines.

The biotech announced Friday evening that regulators had approved lonafarnib for the treatment of Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, also known as Progeria, as well as some progeroid laminopathies in children older than one year. It’s the first approval granted for the condition, and the drug will be marketed and sold as Zokinvy.

Catamaran Bio’s founding members decided to jump into the CAR-NK game last December over drinks at a trendy bar in Boston.

They were sitting around a table, discussing an MD Anderson study which provided some of the first clinical proof that natural killer (NK) cells can be reengineered to attack tumors, much like CAR-T therapies. It was a “long and lively” discussion, COO Mark Boshar recalls. And by the time it was over, they had a starting point to launch a company.