Just two days af­ter the US bought 600,000 more dos­es of Vir and GSK’s Covid-19 an­ti­body sotro­vimab to guard against Omi­cron, Vir Biotech­nol­o­gy an­nounced a part­ner­ship ex­pan­sion with the Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion for its T-cell vac­cine pro­gram.

The part­ner­ship had been in place for a few years with Vir’s T-cell vac­cine pro­gram tar­get­ing TB and HIV. The foun­da­tion is putting up $50 mil­lion — $10 mil­lion in the form of a grant and the rest in an eq­ui­ty in­vest­ment.

The arrange­ment is for an an­ti­body re­search ini­tia­tive, fo­cus­ing on a func­tion­al cure for HIV and malar­ia pre­ven­tion, ac­cord­ing to a joint state­ment. Part of that ini­tia­tive will al­so in­clude a proof-of-con­cept clin­i­cal tri­al, look­ing at en­gi­neered an­ti­bod­ies de­signed to both in­hib­it vi­ral repli­ca­tion and spread in peo­ple in­fect­ed with HIV. And ad­di­tion­al­ly, the part­ners will see if these an­ti­bod­ies can con­fer a vac­cine-like pro­tec­tive ef­fect that could be ap­plic­a­ble to durable HIV sup­pres­sion with­out the use of more com­mon­ly used an­ti­retro­vi­ral ther­a­py. The same con­cept will be ap­plied against malar­ia as part of pre­clin­i­cal re­search.

George Scan­gos

“We look for­ward to ap­ply­ing the lessons learned thus far in COVID-19, chron­ic he­pati­tis B virus in­fec­tion and in­fluen­za to ad­vance our ef­forts to­ward cur­ing HIV and pre­vent­ing malar­ia,” Vir CEO George Scan­gos said in a state­ment.

Just last month, the FDA cleared the first long-act­ing HIV-pre­ven­tion in­jectable, hand­ing Vi­iV a his­toric OK. The com­pa­ny’s treat­ment, Apre­tude, is first giv­en as two in­jec­tions a month apart, then every two months af­ter.

“To­day’s ap­proval adds an im­por­tant tool in the ef­fort to end the HIV epi­dem­ic by pro­vid­ing the first op­tion to pre­vent HIV that does not in­volve tak­ing a dai­ly pill,” FDA di­rec­tor of an­tivi­rals De­bra Birnkrant said at the time.

Despite whispers of a busy year for M&A, deal activity in the pharma space is actually down 30% on a semi-annualized basis, according to PwC’s latest report on deal activity. But don’t rule out larger deals in the second half of the year, the consultants said.

PwC pharmaceutical and life sciences consulting solutions leader Glenn Hunzinger expects to see Big Pharma companies picking up earlier stage companies to try and fill pipeline gaps ahead of a slew of big patent cliffs. Though a bear market continues to maul the biotech sector, Hunzinger said recent deals indicate that pharma companies are still paying above current trading prices.

Following the Supreme Court’s historic decision on Friday to overturn Americans’ constitutional right to an abortion after almost 50 years, Attorney General Merrick Garland sought to somewhat reassure women that states will not be able to ban the prescription drug sometimes used for abortions.

Following the decision, the New England Journal of Medicine also published an editorial strongly condemning the reversal, saying it “serves American families poorly, putting their health, safety, finances, and futures at risk.”

GSK, newly branded and soon-to-be demerged, shared interim results from its Phase II trial on its chronic hepatitis B treatment, one that it says has the “potential to lead to a functional cure.”

At a presentation at the EASL International Liver Congress, GSK shared that in around 450 patients who received its hep B drug bepirovirsen for 24 weeks, just under 30% had hepatitis B surface antigen and viral DNA levels that were too low to detect.

The story of Amryt Pharma’s candidate for the genetic skin condition epidermolysis bullosa, or EB, will soon enter another chapter.

After the Irish drugmaker’s candidate, dubbed Oleogel-S10 and marketed as Filsuvez, was handed a CRL earlier this year, the company announced in a press release that it plans to submit a formal dispute resolution request for the company’s NDA for Oleogel-S10.