Warp Speed bets $356M to mass man­u­fac­ture a Mer­ck drug for se­vere Covid-19

The White House is bet­ting big on a new type of treat­ment for Covid-19, a drug that re­sults from one late-stage tri­al sug­gest­ing it could dras­ti­cal­ly im­prove pa­tients’ odds of re­cov­ery from se­vere dis­ease.

HHS and the De­part­ment of De­fense an­nounced a $356 mil­lion deal to mass man­u­fac­ture MK-7110, the im­mune sys­tem mod­i­fy­ing an­ti­body that Mer­ck ac­quired in their sur­prise $425 mil­lion buy­out of On­coIm­mune last month. The deal would al­low Mer­ck to pro­duce be­tween 60,000 and 100,000 dos­es of the drug by June 2021.

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