→ Uni­ver­si­ty of Basel, Switzer­land spin­out T3 Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals has raised 12 mil­lion CHF at the close of its sec­ond fi­nanc­ing round. Cur­rent in­vestors were joined by Boehringer In­gel­heim Ven­ture Fund and Ref­er­ence Cap­i­tal SA. The round will help pro­pel the can­cer-fo­cused com­pa­ny’s lead prod­uct, T3P-Y058-739, in­to clin­i­cal test­ing, which is ex­pect­ed to be­gin in the mid­dle of 2020.

In ad­di­tion, the com­pa­ny wel­comed aboard Claire Bar­ton as CMO af­ter hav­ing been with the com­pa­ny as a con­sul­tant for the past 18 months. Her pre­vi­ous stints in­clude roles at Glax­oW­ell­come, Lil­ly and Roche.

→ A few weeks af­ter mR­NA uni­corn Mod­er­na tout­ed ear­ly-stage hu­man da­ta, the com­pa­ny is team­ing up with Ul­rich von An­dri­an at Har­vard Med­ical School (HMS) in a mul­ti-year re­search col­lab­o­ra­tion to tack­le im­muno­log­i­cal dis­eases. In ad­di­tion to that $2.45 mil­lion, Mod­er­na will al­so pro­vide $1.2 mil­lion in fund­ing to HMS to es­tab­lish an ini­tia­tive called the Al­liance for RNA Ther­a­pies for the Mod­u­la­tion of the Im­mune Sys­tem (AR­TiMIS), which will make use of Mod­er­na’s mR­NA and nanopar­ti­cle de­liv­ery tech­nol­o­gy.

→ NICE has giv­en the fi­nal no for No­var­tis‘ mi­graine pre­ven­tion drug Aimovig — based on a lack of sig­nif­i­cant da­ta. The watch­dog was un­will­ing to re­tract its orig­i­nal de­ci­sion and said in a state­ment that the tri­als ex­clud­ed in­di­vid­u­als that had shown no ben­e­fit from pri­or treat­ments — the ones who would be in most need of the treat­ment and the “most clin­i­cal­ly im­por­tant sub­group.” In ad­di­tion, the agency said the long-term da­ta pro­vid­ed failed to show sus­tained ben­e­fit, on­ly in­clud­ed peo­ple with episod­ic mi­graines and did not spec­i­fy how many pre­vi­ous treat­ments they had failed be­fore tak­ing the drug. Fi­nal­ly, NICE point­ed out con­cerns that “for the chron­ic mi­graine sub­group, there as no di­rect com­par­i­son with the cur­rent stan­dard of treat­ment, bot­u­linum tox­in type A (Botox), so its su­pe­ri­or­i­ty is un­cer­tain.”

A month after word first broke of the Trump Administration’s plan to rapidly accelerate the development and production of a Covid-19 vaccine, the White House has selected the five vaccine candidates they consider most likely to succeed, The New York Times reported.

Most of the names in the plan, known as Operation Warp Speed, will come as little surprise to those who have watched the last four months of vaccine developments: Moderna, which was the first vaccine to reach humans and is now the furthest along of any US effort; J&J, which has not gone into trials but received around $500 million in funding from BARDA earlier this year; the joint AstraZeneca-Oxford venture which was granted $1.2 billion from BARDA two weeks ago; Pfizer, which has been working with the mRNA biotech BioNTech; and Merck, which just entered the race and expects to put their two vaccine candidates into humans later this year.

Data on remdesivir — the first drug shown to benefit Covid-19 patients in a randomized, controlled trial setting — may be murky, but its maker Gilead could reap billions from the sales of the failed Ebola therapy, according to an estimate by a prominent Wall Street analyst. However, the forecast, which is based on a $5,000-per-course US price tag, triggered the ire of one top drug price expert.

For nearly a decade now, the low-profile Cambridge biotech Kymab has been battling in US, UK, Japanese and Australian courts with the biotech behemoth Regeneron.

Regeneron has turned itself into a $70 billion company off of a platform of transgenically humanized mice they can use to make antibodies for anything from Ebola to colorectal cancer. The technology took decades and billions to build, 20 years from the company’s founding to the first approved drug. And the company guards and touts it zealously, breaking their production process down into various branded components — Velocimmune, Velocigene, Velocimouse and four other Velocis — and sometimes suing would-be copycats. In 2014, most notably, they sued two Pfizer-backed entities for patent infringement.