The US gov­ern­ment is all set to buy $10.7 mil­lion worth of Siga Tech­nolo­gies’ mon­key­pox oral an­tivi­ral, the com­pa­ny an­nounced Thurs­day.

Of the to­tal dos­es, $5.1 mil­lion worth of oral an­tivi­rals called Tpoxx (tecovir­i­mat) will be de­liv­ered this year, with the US De­part­ment of De­fense hav­ing the op­tion of buy­ing the rest at a lat­er point.

The new con­tract fol­lows an ear­li­er one in which the gov­ern­ment had pur­chased $7.4 mil­lion worth of Tpoxx from the com­pa­ny.

Ear­li­er this month, the CDC ex­pand­ed its guide­lines for ex­pand­ed use of Tpoxx to cur­tail the spread of mon­key­pox. The drug is cur­rent­ly on­ly FDA-ap­proved for the treat­ment of small­pox.

An­tho­ny Fau­ci

How­ev­er, there haven’t been enough stud­ies con­duct­ed to con­firm Tpoxx’s ef­fi­ca­cy for mon­key­pox, so tri­als are un­der­way. The Na­tion­al In­sti­tute of Al­ler­gy and In­fec­tious Dis­eases (NI­AID) and the UK have start­ed Phase III tri­als look­ing to en­roll more than 500 par­tic­i­pants each.

“We cur­rent­ly lack ef­fi­ca­cy da­ta that would help us un­der­stand how well this drug may mit­i­gate painful mon­key­pox symp­toms and pre­vent se­ri­ous out­comes. This clin­i­cal tri­al was de­signed to an­swer those im­por­tant ques­tions,” NI­AID di­rec­tor An­tho­ny Fau­ci said in a CDC press state­ment.

Mean­while, the FDA has sug­gest­ed that doc­tors use Tpoxx ju­di­cious­ly, fear­ing that the virus may be­come re­sis­tant to the drug. A small change to the vi­ral pro­tein, which Tpoxx tar­gets, “could have a large im­pact on the an­tivi­ral ac­tiv­i­ty of TPOXX,” the FDA said on its web­site.

Al­though mon­key­pox cas­es have been en­dem­ic in parts of Africa, the dis­ease start­ed spread­ing glob­al­ly in May 2022, prompt­ing the WHO to de­clare the out­break as a glob­al emer­gency on Ju­ly 23. Most cas­es have been in men who have sex with men, al­though women and chil­dren can be­come in­fect­ed, ac­cord­ing to the WHO.

Rochelle Walen­sky

Cur­rent­ly, a two-shot vac­cine called Jyn­neos, man­u­fac­tured by the Dan­ish drug­mak­er Bavar­i­an Nordic, is the on­ly avail­able pro­tec­tion against the dis­ease. Re­cent da­ta by the CDC, how­ev­er, showed that a sin­gle dose of the vac­cine of­fers pro­tec­tion against the virus.

“These new da­ta pro­vide us with a lev­el of cau­tious op­ti­mism that the vac­cine is work­ing as in­tend­ed,” CDC di­rec­tor Rochelle Walen­sky said in a press con­fer­ence on Wednes­day.

Mon­key­pox cas­es have shown a grad­ual de­cline in the US with dai­ly in­fec­tions av­er­ag­ing around 200 this week, as op­posed to 450 cas­es in mid-Au­gust.

The mRNA player Moderna is further cementing its presence on the African continent.

Moderna announced on Thursday that it has finalized an agreement with Kenya’s government to partner up and bring an mRNA manufacturing facility to the east African nation. The new facility aims to manufacture up to 500 million doses of vaccines annually. Moderna also said the new facility will have the ability to spike its production capabilities to respond to public health emergencies on the continent or globally.

ViiV Healthcare has teamed up with the UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool and three generic manufacturers to expand access to medicine that can prevent HIV.

ViiV and the Medicines Patent Pool jointly announced Thursday that the MPP signed sub-licensing agreements with Aurobindo, Cipla and Viatris to manufacture generics of a long-acting form of cabotegravir for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). As a result of the agreement, the manufacturers will be able to develop, manufacture and supply generic versions of cabotegravir LA in 90 countries — subject to regulatory approvals.

Belgian biotech Confo Therapeutics has landed $183 million, plus potential royalties, in a drug-discovery deal with Daiichi Sankyo.

Early Thursday, Confo Therapeutics put out word of the deal that will be focused on small molecule antagonists to go after an undisclosed target that the company says is associated with CNS diseases.

Confo CEO Cedric Ververken told Endpoints News that Daiichi originally reached out to learn about the biotech’s technology. He added that Confo, founded in 2015, will use its platform to drug a GPCR target that Daiichi has struggled with internally.