Please check out the biopharma industry coronavirus (COVID-19) stories that are trending for August 19, 2020.
News information is not all-inclusive and updates will now be published on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
FDA Actions
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced the following actions in its ongoing response effort to the COVID-19 pandemic:
- The FDA has updated its COVID-19 Resources for Health Professionals page to include the CURE ID app. CURE ID allows clinicians to quickly and easily share their experiences treating COVID-19 patients and patients with other difficult-to-treat infectious diseases.
- The FDA is providing two flowcharts and supporting information on respirators:
- For health care providers and facilities: Considerations for Selecting Respirators for Your Health Care Facility
- For manufacturers and distributors: Manufacturing and Distributing Respirators for Health Care Use in the United States Under an Existing Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Diagnostics
Darwin Biosciences is seeking Emergency Use Authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for a COVID-19 screening platform, CoVLab. Different from other saliva-based tests, CoVLab offers the fastest turnaround time available by eliminating the need for off-site or third-party labs, the company said. Results are delivered the same day.
Testing Therapies, Antivirals and Vaccines
Elicio Therapeutics published results from preclinical studies of ELI-005, a protein subunit vaccine for COVID-19. The vaccine elicited a high magnitude T-cell response to COVID-19 alongside potent neutralizing antibody induction.
Company Actions/Announcements
San Diego-based CalciMedica Inc. published data from a study of Auxora as a treatment for patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia in the peer-reviewed medical journal Critical Care. The data showed substantially improved outcomes in those patients. Auxora, a potent and selective small molecule CRAC channel inhibitor, combined with standard of care therapy showed faster recovery and reduced by over half the use of invasive mechanical ventilation and death in patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia as compared to standard of care alone. Auxora also demonstrated a favorable safety profile in patients with both severe and critical COVID-19 pneumonia compared to standard of care alone.
Castor, a clinical data platform company that made its platform freely available for all non-profit COVID-19 research, secured $12 million in a financing round. More than 200 COVID-19 projects across 33 countries are currently running on the platform.
Adaptive Phage Therapeutics, Inc. received $9.8 million from the U.S. Department of Defense for research development of multiple high-priority, bacteriophage-based display vaccine candidates against the novel coronavirus. Phage-based vaccines offer significant potential benefits by establishing a platform approach with the ability to quickly adjust the vaccine in response to mutations in the coronavirus, the company said.
Centogene opened a walk-in COVID-19 test facility at Frankfurt Airport in Germany. The test facility is open to the general public and can test daily from 6:00 am to 8:00 pm CEST at the test center located at Terminal 1.
Other Industry News
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) plans to have state and local health departments collect data on sewage samples to find traces of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The CDC said that wastewater can be a string indicator of a worsening outbreak.
