Months af­ter se­cur­ing up to $21 mil­lion in fund­ing from the Coali­tion for Epi­dem­ic Pre­pared­ness In­no­va­tions (CEPI) for its Chikun­gun­ya vac­cine — which is be­ing prepped for a late-stage tri­al — Vi­en­na, Aus­tria-based Themis Bio­science en­tered in­to a pact with US drug­mak­er Mer­ck.

The Eu­ro­pean vac­cine de­vel­op­er formed in 2009 and a year lat­er joined forces with the In­sti­tut Pas­teur — gain­ing ex­clu­sive ac­cess to a measles virus vac­cine vec­tor tech­nol­o­gy, which now forms the back­bone of its plat­form.

Con­sid­er­ing it has been used to vac­ci­nate bil­lions of peo­ple, the at­ten­u­at­ed measles virus is one of the most ef­fec­tive and safe vac­cines avail­able, mak­ing it an at­trac­tive can­di­date vec­tor to avert in­fec­tious dis­ease.

In con­trast to oth­er ap­proach­es, Themis has de­vel­oped the tech­nol­o­gy to in­cor­po­rate mul­ti­ple large re­com­bi­nant pro­tein anti­gens in­to the vec­tor, which then acts as a de­liv­ery ve­hi­cle to trans­port the anti­gen pay­load di­rect­ly to macrophages and den­drit­ic cells. Fur­ther, since the vec­tor it­self repli­cates — there­by ex­press­ing anti­gens even af­ter im­mu­niza­tion — Themis’ vac­cine can­di­dates are en­gi­neered to con­fer long-term im­mu­ni­ty, chief Erich Tauber told End­points News.

Apart from its lead ex­per­i­men­tal Chikun­gun­ya vac­cine, Themis has a Zi­ka vac­cine and Las­sa fever in ear­ly-stage de­vel­op­ment. It al­so has a range of pre­clin­i­cal pro­grams, in­clud­ing those for res­pi­ra­to­ry syn­cy­tial virus (RSV), cy­tomegalovirus (CMV), norovirus and Mid­dle East Res­pi­ra­to­ry Syn­drome (MERS).

The vec­tor al­so has the in­trin­sic abil­i­ty to at­tack can­cer cells, which has been demon­strat­ed in var­i­ous pre­clin­i­cal stud­ies, he added. The com­pa­ny is there­fore cap­i­tal­iz­ing on that po­ten­tial by equip­ping the vec­tor with ad­di­tion­al tu­mor-killing pay­loads to de­vel­op on­col­o­gy treat­ments. Themis’s first im­muno-on­col­o­gy vac­cine is set to en­ter the clin­ic this year.

The terms of the Mer­ck $MRK part­ner­ship are shroud­ed in mys­tery. The two will work on a “block­buster in­di­ca­tion” and the New Jer­sey-based drug man­u­fac­tur­er will grant up to $200 mil­lion in mile­stone pay­ments, in ad­di­tion to roy­al­ties. Mer­ck has al­so made an undis­closed eq­ui­ty in­vest­ment in Themis.

Mer­ck, which has been bask­ing in the suc­cess of its flag­ship check­point in­hibitor Keytru­da, caus­ing some to wor­ry it may be lean­ing too heav­i­ly on the block­buster, has sharp­ened its fo­cus on its vac­cine port­fo­lio. In May, its pneu­mo­coc­cal con­ju­gate vac­cine can­di­date aimed at top­pling Pfiz­er’s best­seller, Pre­vnar 13, cleared a mid-stage study — and is al­so be­ing eval­u­at­ed in var­i­ous Phase III tri­als. Mer­ck al­so has a part­ner­ship with mR­NA com­pa­ny Mod­er­na $MR­NA, fo­cused on per­son­al­ized can­cer vac­cines that are cus­tomized for each pa­tient.

Fenlai Tan still gets chills thinking about the darkest day of his life.

Three out of eight lung cancer patients who received a tyrosine kinase inhibitor developed by his company, Betta Pharma, died in the span of a month. Tan, the chief medical officer, was summoned to Peking Union Medical College Hospital, where the head of the clinical trial department told him that the trial investigators would be conducting an autopsy to see if the patients had died of the disease — they were all very sick by the time they enrolled — or of interstitial lung disease, a deadly side effect tied to the TKI class that’s been reported in Japan.

After flopping a test in Covid-19 earlier this year, Angion’s lead organ damage drug has now hit the skids again in kidney transplant patients.

Angion and partner Vifor Pharma’s ANG-3777 failed to beat out placebo in terms of improving eGFR, a measure of kidney function, in patients who had received a deceased donor kidney transplant and were at high risk of developing what is known as delayed graft function, according to Phase III results released Tuesday.