Pfiz­er is tak­ing a nov­el tac­tic in its ap­proach to the Russ­ian war against Ukraine as CEO Al­bert Bourla told staffers on Wednes­day that the com­pa­ny is putting its first $5 mil­lion in Russ­ian prof­its to­ward eight glob­al and lo­cal NGOs to sup­port hu­man­i­tar­i­an re­lief and re­sponse ef­forts in Ukraine.

“We will con­tin­ue to di­vert these prof­its to the Ukrain­ian peo­ple un­til peace is achieved. Un­til that time, we al­so stand firm in our de­ci­sion to cease all our clin­i­cal tri­als in Rus­sia and to halt all in­vest­ments in lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­ing,” Bourla wrote to col­leagues.

Pfiz­er joins with at least a half dozen oth­er Big Phar­ma com­pa­nies like Ab­b­Vie, No­var­tis and Eli Lil­ly in halt­ing tri­als or sus­pend­ing cer­tain busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ties in Rus­sia due to the war.

For Lil­ly, ef­forts in­clud­ed stop­ping the ex­port of non-es­sen­tial med­i­cines in­to Rus­sia. Those non-es­sen­tial med­i­cines would in­clude med­i­cines such as Cialis, a Lil­ly spokesper­son told End­points pre­vi­ous­ly.

No­var­tis, mean­while, told End­points that it’s tak­ing a two-fold re­sponse: an ini­tial $3 mil­lion do­na­tion to mul­ti­ple NGOs, and they “have de­cid­ed to sus­pend any in­vest­ments in Rus­sia and stop all com­mer­cial mar­ket­ing ac­tiv­i­ties, as well as all sci­en­tif­ic events, or­ga­nized by us or by ex­ter­nal par­ties.”

The com­pa­nies are all help­ing out on the hu­man­i­tar­i­an side of the con­flict too, as many must con­tin­ue to sup­ply life-sav­ing drugs to Rus­sia.

“I am proud that Pfiz­er chose to lead with a nov­el ap­proach in re­spond­ing to this cri­sis,” Bourla wrote, adding:

While many multi­na­tion­als have ex­it­ed Rus­sia com­plete­ly, we in the bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal sec­tor have had a his­tor­i­cal ex­emp­tion from eco­nom­ic sanc­tions on a so-called “hu­man­i­tar­i­an” ba­sis, as we have an oblig­a­tion to de­liv­er our life­sav­ing med­i­cines and vac­cines to pa­tients re­gard­less of the cir­cum­stances. But rather than use this ex­cep­tion as an ex­cuse to do noth­ing more than busi­ness as usu­al, we found a way to con­tin­ue to serve pa­tients while al­so help­ing those whose lives have been torn apart by the war.

AstraZeneca’s first consumer ad for Evusheld is also a first for drugs that have been granted emergency use authorizations during the pandemic.

The first DTC ad for a medicine under emergency approval, the Evusheld campaign launching this week aims to raise awareness among immunocompromised patients — and spur more use.

Evusheld nabbed emergency authorization in December, however, despite millions of immunocompromised people looking for a solution and now more widespread availability of the drug.

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2021 saw a record $600B in healthcare M&A activity. In 2022, there is an anticipated slowdown in activity, however, M&A prospects remain strong in the medium to long-term. What are future growth drivers for the healthcare sector? Where might we see innovations that drive M&A? RBC’s Andrew Callaway, Global Head, Healthcare Investment Banking discusses with Vito Sperduto, Global Co-Head, M&A.

While European companies, including BioNTech, are focused on increasing vaccine access to African countries by setting up vaccine manufacturing facilities, the European Union is looking westward to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Speaking at a press conference with Spanish Prime Minister Pédro Sanchez, president of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU is launching a new initiative for vaccines and medicines manufacturing in Latin America, to get to drugs to Latin America and the Caribbean faster.

GSK is continuing to build out its Barnard Castle site in the UK.

According to the company, it has opened a new aseptic smart manufacturing facility at the site, which is located in County Durham in the northeast of England.

The new facility, known as Q Block, is a fully automated and digital facility that leverages digital technology to make manufacturing operations as efficient as possible.

The 11,500-square-meter facility started construction in 2018 and according to the UK news site Business Live, the costs for the new building were £90 million, or around $110 million.

A drug manufacturing facility in Mexico is drawing the ire of the FDA after it ignored the US regulator’s inspection requests and phone calls.

According to the warning letter issued on June 13, Glicerinas Industriales refused a pre-announced inspection during a phone call with FDA prior to the inspection at the company’s facility in Zapopan, Mexico, a city next to Guadalajara, which was planned for May 16 to May 20.

As the US House Appropriations committee marks up a bill today to provide the FDA with a 10% budget boost in FY 2023, the committee also offered up a long wish list of topics that it wants the FDA to address.

The list ranges from urging CDER to better use artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance its review process for supplements or repurposed drug candidates “by leveraging automated data collection, integration, and advanced statistical methods,” to encourage the FDA to publish guidance for cell therapy developers, to increasing staff in key areas.

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CANNES – When Olympic gold medalist Tianna Bartoletta went to the hospital to deliver her son last year, she packed signed advanced directives and her will in her bag. Why? Her past experience with the healthcare system while training for the 2020 Toyko Olympics.

She was training in sprint and long jump — after winning two golds in 2016 and one in 2012 — when she began to notice changes in her period. While Bartoletta initially rationalized it as stress or training too hard, it kept getting worse — to the point where she had dizzy spells and episodes of passing out. So she went to the doctor.

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CANNES —  As a young scientist, Sommer Bazuro was looking at oncology data when she realized that the patient population was not at all representative of the demographics most likely to suffer and die from cancer.

Thinking it must be an isolated incident, she turned to peer-reviewed publications and began talking to oncologists, only to discover that a lack of diversity in clinical trials was par for the course. Black and Hispanic patients typically don’t even reach levels of representation consistent with the general population.

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In randomized clinical trial data from a small number of patients, Dutch biotech uniQure shared that its gene therapy for Huntington’s disease seems to reduce the amount of the mutant protein responsible for the disease over the course of a year.

In seven patients with early-stage Huntington’s — four who got the treatment and three who got a placebo — mutant huntingtin protein levels in the cerebrospinal fluid decreased by an average of just over 50% in patients who got the gene therapy compared to around a 17% drop in patients who got the placebo after a year.

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Bioscience & Technology Business Center The University of Kansas Lawrence, Kansas

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