Ovid ships off twice-failed asset

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Today's Rundown

Featured Story

Pfizer, in a rare COVID-19 setback, dumps Paxlovid's intravenous sibling to leave ACTIV-3 future in doubt

Add Pfizer to the long list of victims of ACTIV-3. While the Big Pharma has enjoyed unparalleled success in COVID-19, it was unable to buck the trend in the NIH study of hospitalized patients and has stopped development of Paxlovid’s intravenous sibling PF-07304814.

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Top Stories

UPDATE: Editas suddenly terminates Chief Medical Officer Lisa Michaels without explanation

Editas Medicine has fired Chief Medical Officer Lisa Michaels, M.D., just 15 months into her tenure at the gene editing company. 

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Ovid pens deal to offload twice-failed former lead program, positioning Healx to write new chapter in fragile X

Ovid Therapeutics has found a potential buyer for its onetime lead program. A little more than one year after gaboxadol’s value-crushing phase 3 flop, Healx has stepped in to see whether it can write another chapter in the long, failure-strewn history of the neurological disease drug. 

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After reaching a high with $12B valuation, Biosplice lays off staff and axes baldness program

After reaching a $12 billion valuation in 2018, Biosplice appears to be falling back down to Earth, and its workforce is taking the brunt. The company is laying off 41 workers and has culled a male pattern baldness drug from its pipeline.

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Congruence pulls in $50M series A to build a team of 'drug hunters' to go after rare disease targets

A new biotech called Congruence Therapeutics just snagged $50 million to build a new team of "drug hunters" focused on protein misfolding to go after rare diseases.

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Amgen's COVID-19 manufacturing deal with Lilly helped compensate for lagging Aimovig, Enbrel in Q4

As Amgen struggles to find growth from its own drugs, the company got a nice late-2021 revenue bump from its manufacturing partnership with Eli Lilly.

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CooperSurgical to acquire Cook Medical's IVF, OB-GYN businesses for $875M

Cook’s subsidiaries will continue to manufacture products for CooperSurgical during a two-year transition.

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Centene posts $599M in profit for Q4 2021 a year after posting a loss in Q4 2020

Centene Corporation brought in $599 million in profit for the fourth quarter of 2021 after posting a loss in the fourth quarter of 2020.

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New CRISPR tool maps out routes to better immune cell therapies for cancer, autoimmune diseases

A new CRISPR platform designed by UCSF allowed researchers to perform genomewide CRISPR screens in primary human T cells like never before. The system identified several previously unknown regulators of cytokine production, which could aid the design of next-generation cell therapies, the team said.

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Bristol Myers Squibb doles out $8M in new grants to improve health equity with cardiovascular, oncology focus

Bristol Myers Squibb announced nearly $8 million in new grants as a part of its pledge to spend $150 million over five years to address health disparities. The company intends for recipients of this round of grants to bolster community health workers and patient navigators.

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Senators introduce bipartisan bill to extend patient access to telehealth through 2024

Two U.S. senators introduced bipartisan legislation Monday to extend current Medicare telehealth reimbursement waivers an additional two years following the end of the public health emergency.

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DNA-based HIV vaccine produces critical tier-2 neutralizing antibodies in mouse model

Researchers at the Wistar Institute said they were able to elicit an important group of antibodies for fighting HIV in mice. The findings could lead to "more advanced HIV vaccine concepts," the researchers reported in Nature Communications.

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FDA must shore up plans for surprise foreign inspections, rev up hiring of overseas investigators, GAO says

To tackle three big hurdles facing its inspection work overseas, the FDA needs to develop “tailored strategies and time frames” to recruit investigators for its foreign inspection workforce, the Government Accountability Office said Monday. Likewise, the regulator needs to make a roadmap for surprise foreign inspections, the agency said.

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