Every few years, a pub­lic health cri­sis (think Ebo­la, Zi­ka) spurred by a rogue pathogen trig­gers a small-biotech ral­ly, as drug­mak­ers emerge from the wood­work with am­bi­tious plans to treat the mount­ing out­break. In most cas­es, that en­thu­si­asm nev­er quite de­liv­ers.

Things are no dif­fer­ent, as the coro­n­avirus out­break in Wuhan, Chi­na takes hold. There have been close to 300 con­firmed hu­man in­fec­tions in Chi­na, and at least four deaths. Coro­n­avirus­es are a large fam­i­ly of virus­es, which in­clude MERS and SARS. On Tues­day, the CDC re­port­ed the virus was de­tect­ed in a US trav­el­er re­turn­ing from Wuhan.

Shares of Mary­land-based vac­cine de­vel­op­er, No­vavax, which has seen a steady stream of set­backs with its RSV vac­cine and is cur­rent­ly in late-stage de­vel­op­ment with a flu vac­cine, saw its shares $NVAX cat­a­pult on Tues­day — clos­ing up more than 71% at $9.82. The com­pa­ny’s tech­nol­o­gy has al­so been used to de­vel­op ex­per­i­men­tal vac­cines for MERS and SARS.

In an email to End­points News on Wednes­day, the com­pa­ny said it ex­pects to de­vel­op a vac­cine can­di­date from the ge­net­ic se­quence of the Wuhan coro­n­avirus. The stock was down near­ly 16% at $8.25 on Wednes­day morn­ing, af­ter the drug­mak­er al­so dis­closed plans to sell $100 mil­lion worth of shares in a pub­lic of­fer­ing af­ter the mar­ket closed on Tues­day.

Mean­while, mR­NA-fo­cused Mod­er­na al­so un­veiled its plans on Wednes­day. The com­pa­ny is­sued a state­ment say­ing it is work­ing with NIH’s vac­cine re­search cen­ter on a po­ten­tial vac­cine re­sponse to the cur­rent pub­lic health emer­gency. Shares of the Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­sets-based de­vel­op­er $MR­NA — which pulled off a his­toric $604 mil­lion IPO in late 2018 — were up near­ly 9% at 22.80.

“Mar­kets tend to bot­tom with the peak in new cas­es and news flow,” JP Mor­gan an­a­lysts said, as cit­ed by Mar­ket­Watch. “A pos­i­tive bias is ap­pro­pri­ate on phar­ma stocks broad­ly and mak­ers of di­ag­nos­tic kits and pro­tec­tive equip­ment (like gloves).”

An­tho­ny Fau­ci NI­AID

Ther­a­peu­tics will like­ly make the cut be­fore vac­cines do, An­tho­ny Fau­ci, di­rec­tor of NIH’s Na­tion­al In­sti­tute of Al­ler­gy and In­fec­tious Dis­eases (NI­AID), sug­gest­ed in an in­ter­view with Bio­Cen­tu­ry.

The agency plans to in­ves­ti­gate the ef­fi­ca­cy of ex­ist­ing an­tivi­rals and mon­o­clon­al an­ti­bod­ies, as well as de­vel­op a ther­a­py us­ing an­ti­bod­ies de­rived from blood drawn from a pa­tient di­ag­nosed in the state of Wash­ing­ton (the trav­el­er) to fight the Chi­na coro­n­avirus strain, he said in the re­port.

Oth­er biotech stocks al­so rose as new coro­n­avirus cas­es came to light.

Shares of a de­vel­op­er of nano-med­i­cines for vi­ral in­fec­tions, NanoVi­ri­cides, jumped more than 150% on Tues­day, but the shares $NNVC pared gains on Wednes­day, falling more than 52% to $4.07. Aethlon Med­ical $AEMD, a de­vice mak­er de­vel­op­ing a he­mo­p­u­ri­fi­er to com­bat vi­ral dis­eases, jumped more than 15% to $2.6. Shares of In­ovio Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals $INO — which is work­ing on a MERS vac­cine — al­so ticked high­er on Tues­day, al­though the stock was in the red on Wednes­day. BioCryst Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, which is de­vel­op­ing a yel­low fever and Mar­burg virus drug that has shown ear­ly promise in coro­n­avirus­es, al­so saw its shares $BCRX rise about 5.5% to $3.09 on Wednes­day.

Max­im Ja­cobs, man­ag­ing ed­i­tor of in­vest­ment re­search firm Edi­son, sug­gest­ed the out­cry over coro­n­avirus­es was mis­placed.

Coro­n­avirus­es typ­i­cal­ly cir­cu­late among an­i­mals, such as camels, cats, and bats. Rarely, there is an­i­mal-to-per­son trans­mis­sion, as is sus­pect­ed in the Wuhan out­break. Many pa­tients af­flict­ed in Chi­na were linked to a large seafood and an­i­mal mar­ket, al­though there are cas­es where pa­tients were not ex­posed to the mar­ket at all, which sug­gests there is “lim­it­ed per­son-to-per­son spread…though it’s un­clear how eas­i­ly or sus­tain­ably this virus is spread­ing be­tween peo­ple,” the CDC said.

New York City is investing $20 million in biotech this year in the form of a 50,000-square-foot “innovation space” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, complete with offices, research laboratories and events and programming space to grow biotech startups and companies.

Mayor Eric Adams said during his State of The City Address last Thursday that there will be an “emphasis” on making more opportunities for women and people of color to further diversify the industry. The City first reported the news.

Boehringer Ingelheim uncorked some positive results suggesting that Spevigo can help prevent flare-ups in patients with a severe form of psoriasis, months after the drug was approved to treat existing flares.

Spevigo, an IL-36R antibody also known as spesolimab, met its primary and a key secondary endpoint in the Phase IIb EFFISAYIL 2 trial in patients with generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP), Boehringer announced on Monday. While the company is keeping the hard numbers under wraps until later this year, it said in a news release that it anticipates sharing the results with regulators.

AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi won an appeals court win on Monday, as the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found that the companies cannot be forced to provide 340B-discounted drugs purchased by hospitals from an unlimited number of community and specialty pharmacies.

“Legal duties do not spring from silence,” the decision says as the court makes clear that the federal government’s interpretation of the “supposed requirement” that the 340B program compels drugmakers to supply their discounted drugs to an unlimited number of contract pharmacies is not correct, noting:

A US appeals court has ruled against Johnson & Johnson’s use of bankruptcy to deal with mounting talc lawsuits, deciding that doing so would “create a legal blind spot.”

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a previous bankruptcy court decision on Monday, calling for the dismissal of a Chapter 11 filing by J&J’s subsidiary LTL Management.

Faced with more than 38,000 lawsuits alleging its talc-based products caused cancer, J&J spun its talc liabilities into a separate company called LTL Management back in October 2021 and filed for bankruptcy, a controversial move colloquially referred to as a “Texas two-step” bankruptcy. Claimants argued that the strategy is a misuse of the US bankruptcy code — and on Monday, a panel of judges agreed.