As the com­bined fre­quen­cy of the Covid-19 vari­ants first iden­ti­fied in Brazil and South Africa now ex­ceeds 10% in Ari­zona, Cal­i­for­nia, Flori­da, In­di­ana, Ore­gon and Wash­ing­ton, the US said Wednes­day that it’s halt­ing all ship­ments to those states of Eli Lil­ly’s mAb com­bo to treat Covid-19 pri­or to hos­pi­tal­iza­tions.

The FDA rec­om­mends that health care providers in those six states use Re­gen­eron’s mAb cock­tail as an al­ter­na­tive au­tho­rized mon­o­clon­al an­ti­body ther­a­py be­cause it’s more ef­fec­tive against the vari­ants than the Lil­ly treat­ment.

“RE­GEN-COV is like­ly to re­tain ac­tiv­i­ty against the P.1 and B.1.351 vari­ants,” the As­sis­tant Sec­re­tary for Pre­pared­ness and Re­sponse and FDA said in a state­ment.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, the US halt­ed ship­ments of the Lil­ly com­bo of bam­lanivimab and ete­se­vimab to Illi­nois and Mass­a­chu­setts be­cause of the vari­ant first iden­ti­fied in Brazil. FDA al­so re­voked the EUA for bam­lanivimab alone last month be­cause it was no longer as ef­fec­tive as a com­bo ther­a­py.

The con­tin­u­al­ly shift­ing land­scape of mAbs to treat Covid-19 al­so saw the ad­di­tion of an EUA for an­oth­er mAb treat­ment from Vir and Glax­o­SmithK­line on Wednes­day. Vir says their sin­gle an­ti­body can neu­tral­ize each of the vari­ants sci­en­tists sus­pect are pro­lif­er­at­ing, al­though it’s still un­known how many dos­es of the new mAb will be avail­able.

So here’s how Blackstone is spending its $4.6 billion biopharma pot.

The private equity firm announced Tuesday they were teaming with the CRISPR biotech Intellia and the little-known German CAR-T startup GEMoaB to launch a new — and so far unnamed — CAR-T company. Blackstone, the sole investor, will pour $250 million into the joint venture and take a third ownership. Intellia and Cellex, GEMoaB’s parent company, will each take another third.

A group of drug regulators from Australia, Canada, Singapore, Switzerland and the UK on Tuesday unveiled their strategic plans for the next three years, laying out how they’ll work together on reviewing new drugs to reduce duplication across borders.

While understanding that the biopharma industry is truly global, the group, known collectively as the Access Consortium, seeks to better align their respective regulatory and policy approaches for pharmaceuticals, with an aim to facilitate faster access to high quality, safe and effective health products.

As the Biden administration tries to wrangle the details of its infrastructure bill, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) took a concrete step forward on drug pricing reforms on Tuesday and unveiled five principles for such reforms, including providing Medicare with the ability to negotiate prices.

“Allowing the Secretary of HHS to negotiate the price Medicare will pay creates a much needed mechanism to achieve fairer prices when the market has failed to do so,” Wyden wrote.

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