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.

It’s official. Memorial Sloan Kettering has picked a brain cancer expert as its new physician-in-chief and CMO, replacing José Baselga, who left under a cloud after being singled out by The New York Times and ProPublica for failing to properly air his lucrative industry ties.

His replacement, who now will be in charge of MSK’s cutting-edge research work as well as the cancer care delivered by hundreds of practitioners, is Lisa M. DeAngelis. DeAngelis had been chair of the neurology department and co-founder of MSK’s brain tumor center and was moved in to the acting CMO role in the wake of Baselga’s departure.

More than two years ago Ritter Pharmaceuticals managed to find enough silver lining in its Phase IIb/III study — after missing the top-line mark — to propel its lactose intolerance toward a confirmatory trial. But as it turned out, the enthusiasm only set the biotech and its investors up to be sorely disappointed.

This time around there’s little left to salvage. Not only did RP-G28 fail to beat placebo in reducing lactose intolerance symptoms, patients in the treatment group actually averaged a smaller improvement. On a composite score measuring symptoms like abdominal pain, cramping, bloating and gas, patients given the drug had a mean reduction of 3.159 while the placebo cohort saw a 3.420 drop on average (one-sided p-value = 0.0106).

An early-stage update on Adverum Biotechnologies’ intravitreal gene therapy has triggered investor concern, after patients with wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) saw their vision deteriorate, despite signs that the treatment is improving retinal anatomy.

Adverum, on Wednesday, unveiled 24-week data from the OPTIC trial of its experimental therapy, ADVM-022, in six patients who have been administered with one dose of the therapy. On average, patients in the trial had severe disease with an average of 6.2 anti-VEGF injections in the eight months prior to screening and an average annualized injection frequency of 9.3 injections.

Too often, Alex Arfaei arrived too late. 

An analyst at BMO Capital Markets, he’d meet with biotech or pharmaceutical heads for their IPO or secondary funding and his brain, trained on a biology degree and six years at Merck and Endo, would spring with questions: Why this biomarker? Why this design? Why not this endpoint? Not that he could do anything about it. These execs were coming for clinical money; their decisions had been made and finalized long ago.