AstraZeneca and IDT Biologika are exploring options to accelerate output of finished COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca in the second quarter of 2021 in order to help support Europe’s immediate vaccination needs during the pandemic.
Immunity-centric biotech firm lands $60m in Series A funding Immunai has secured a total of $80m in funding to develop and promote its efforts to harness machine learning to fuel advancement of novel immunotherapies.
New York City- and Tel Aviv-based biotechnology firm Immunai has secured another $60m in Series A funding, bringing the company’s total funding landed to date to more than $80m. Immunai’s technology integrates multi-omic single-cell analytics and machine learning (ML) to identify novel immunological insights, in the hopes of discovering and developing effective and targeted immunotherapies.
According to Immunai, the firm will use the funding to expand its AMICA (annotated multi-omic immune cell atlas) database. The company also plans to extend its functional genomics capabilities to reprogram immune cells and validate targets to better support discovery, prioritization, and development of new therapies and drug combinations.
Collaboration is not an unknown in the domain of pharmaceutical development, but it is rare enough. The demands of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, have seen competitors switch to become manufacturing allies.
Health officials in Azerbaijan have granted approval for a clinical trial to take place in that country combining Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine with the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 shot in adults 18 years and older.
UK project looks to transform oligonucleotide medicines manufacturing UK catalyst organization, CPI, has announced the launch of a project that aims to revolutionize the manufacture of oligonucleotides, through a collaboration involving, among others, AstraZeneca, Exactmer, and Novartis.
The partners are looking to develop a scalable, sustainable and more cost-effective medicines manufacturing process for oligonucleotides: short strands of synthetic DNA or RNA. They will utilize their combined expertise across scale-up, analytics and process development to achieve those goals.
Oligonucleotides, which are short strands of synthetic DNA or RNA, can be used as medicines by interfering with how genes are expressed. While they have shown success in the treatment of rare diseases, this next-generation therapeutic class is now being explored to treat chronic diseases that affect much larger patient populations, said CPI.