Pres­i­dent Joe Biden made clear in his “fin­ish the job” State of the Union ad­dress last night that one of those jobs to be fin­ished is in­sulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tack­le in­sulin prices, af­ter Re­pub­li­cans re­buffed the idea last sum­mer and just af­ter Biden won Medicare drug price ne­go­ti­a­tions/caps via the In­fla­tion Re­duc­tion Act, shows how heav­i­ly he’s lean­ing in­to this work.

“You know, we pay more for pre­scrip­tion drugs than any ma­jor coun­try on Earth,” he said last night, pledg­ing ac­tion.

We capped the cost of in­sulin at $35 a month for se­niors on Medicare. But there are mil­lions of oth­er Amer­i­cans who are not on Medicare, in­clud­ing 200,000 young peo­ple with Type I di­a­betes who need in­sulin to save their lives. Let’s fin­ish the job this time.  Let’s cap the cost of in­sulin at $35 a month for every Amer­i­can who needs it.

The call to cap out-of-pock­et costs for in­sulin at $35 per month is not new, and even some of the biggest in­sulin mak­ers like Eli Lil­ly and Sanofi are back­ing the mea­sure.

In June, Sanofi al­so cut the month­ly price of its in­sulins for unin­sured Amer­i­cans to $35, down from $99 pre­vi­ous­ly.

Biden al­so played up the IRA’s oth­er new cap — on out-of-pock­et drug costs for se­niors on Medicare, which is now set at a max­i­mum of $2,000 per year. He al­so touched on how if drug prices now rise faster than in­fla­tion, “drug com­pa­nies will have to pay Medicare back the dif­fer­ence. And we’re fi­nal­ly giv­ing Medicare the pow­er to ne­go­ti­ate drug prices. Bring­ing down pre­scrip­tion drug costs doesn’t just save se­niors mon­ey.”

De­tails on both the re­bates and ne­go­ti­a­tions still need to be ironed out at CMS in the com­ing months, but Biden not­ed that some mem­bers (it passed on a strict­ly par­ti­san vote) are threat­en­ing to re­peal the IRA, to which Biden promised a swift ve­to.

“Make no mis­take, if you try to do any­thing to raise the cost of pre­scrip­tion drugs, I will ve­to it,” he said.

Over­all, the speech con­tin­ued his pub­lic push against phar­ma.

From mid-Au­gust through ear­ly No­vem­ber, Biden was not ex­act­ly shy about how hap­py he was to have de­feat­ed Big Phar­ma with the pas­sage of the IRA and the sub­se­quent Medicare drug price ne­go­ti­a­tions that will kick off in 2026.

Biden’s ral­ly­ing cry around beat­ing Big Phar­ma has been the high­light of stump speech­es.

“We beat Phar­ma this year,” Biden said at a La­bor Day cel­e­bra­tion in Mil­wau­kee on Sept. 5. “We beat Phar­ma this year, and it mat­tered. We’re go­ing to change peo­ple’s lives. (Ap­plause.) We fi­nal­ly beat Phar­ma.”

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.

Catalent will be manufacturing a low-cost version of the opioid overdose treatment naloxone as part of a contract with Harm Reduction Therapeutics.

Catalent plans to manufacture the treatment at its facility in Morrisville, NC. No financial details on the deal were disclosed.

Harm Reduction was granted priority review status for the NDA on its spray last year. The company has been working on a naloxone product since 2017. It is anticipating approval in July of this year and a US launch in early 2024.

Last year, South African-based vaccine manufacturer Aspen Pharmacare was facing reports that it had not received a single order for its manufactured Covid-19 shots and that manufacturing lines were sitting idle. But now the vaccine producer is looking to turn things around.

Aspen’s disclosure of its financial results in March unveiled that manufacturing revenue had decreased by 12% to R 603 million ($33.8 million), which Lorraine Hill, Aspen Group’s COO, said is attributable to lower Covid vaccine sales.

Thermo Fisher Scientific is putting down more roots in the Bay Area.

The manufacturer opened the doors to a new cell therapy manufacturing facility next to the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center’s Mission Bay campus and on the university’s campus.

UCSF and Thermo Fisher have had a partnership since 2021, with the new site focusing on manufacturing cell therapeutics for certain cancers, including glioblastoma and multiple myeloma. The new site plans to use Thermo Fisher’s expertise in manufacturing services to help UCSF accelerate the development of cell therapies and eventually get them into the clinic, said Dan Herring, the general manager of cell therapy services at Thermo Fisher, in an interview with Endpoints News.

Dallas-based biotech Nanoscope Therapeutics unveiled Phase II results on its gene therapy for a rare eye disease Thursday morning.

In the RESTORE trial, 18 patients with retinitis pigmentosa got a gene therapy called MCO-010 while nine got placebo. On a vision test called the MLYMT, the treatment group had a one-point greater change over one year in their score compared to the placebo group, the primary endpoint of the study. However, the 95% confidence interval was 0.0 to 3.0, meaning the result was not statistically significant. The p-value was not provided.