https://www.outsourcing-pharma.com/Article/2020/03/27/Bill-Gates-big-pharma-collaborate-on-COVID-19-treatments
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Mainz, Germany, September 4, 2019
BioNTech SE, a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on patient-specific immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer and other serious diseases, announced today that it has signed an agreement with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop HIV and tuberculosis programs, further expanding the company’s infectious disease portfolio. This partnership includes an initial equity investment of $55 million, which is expected to close within the next week. The funds will be used to develop preclinical vaccine and immunotherapy candidates to prevent HIV and tuberculosis infection as well as to lead to durable antiretroviral therapy-free remission of HIV disease. Total funding under the collaboration could reach $100 million through potential future grant funding from the Gates Foundation that would be used to underwrite the evaluation of these candidates in the clinic and support the initiation of new infectious disease projects….
Lynda Stuart, Deputy Director, Vaccines and Human Immunobiology, Discovery and Translational Sciences at the Gates Foundation: “BioNTech’s innovative mRNA-based approach and in-depth understanding of the immune system offer exciting pathways to develop effective new immune-based therapies that could dramatically reduce the global incidence of HIV and tuberculosis. We believe this partnership will add to our portfolio of innovative tools and could make a significant impact.”
Under the terms of the agreement the collaboration will fund the identification of potential HIV and tuberculosis vaccine and immunotherapy candidates and their pre-clinical development. It will further enable BioNTech to build out its infectious disease infrastructure, including platform development and may allow the company to initiate three new additional programs within its infectious disease portfolio. … Its cutting-edge pipeline includes individualized mRNA-based product candidates, innovative chimeric antigen receptor T cells, novel checkpoint immuno-modulators, targeted cancer antibodies and small molecules. BioNTech’s product development approach has been validated by seven collaborations with, in chronological order, Eli Lilly and Company, Genmab, Sanofi, Bayer Animal Health, Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, Genevant and Pfizer, and its scientific approach through over 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications. BioNTech’s shareholders include the Struengmann Family Office as its majority shareholder
https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-details/biontech-announces-new-collaboration-develop-hiv-and (Pfizer also teams with China through their 500 employee R&D facility at BioLake at Wuhan, China, as of 2016. -r)
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Two German billionaire biotech investors are also behind BioNTech, which announced Monday it’s developing a vaccine.
As the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine intensifies, one player--German drugmaker CureVac--is backed by particularly deep pockets. CureVac, which is in the headlines amid rumors that the U.S. government offered funding to lure its research exclusively to America, counts one of Germany’s richest entrepreneurs, Mexican shopping mall tycoons and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation among its investors.
The company’s largest shareholder is German billionaire Dietmar Hopp who made his fortune as a cofounder of enterprise software company SAP. Hopp, who Forbes estimates to be worth $13.4 billion, has become a significant biotech investor. He said in an interview with the German publication Handelsblatt that he has put over $1.5 billion into biotech firms….The drugmaker uses messenger RNA to develop immunotherapies for fighting cancer and rare diseases. https://www.forbes.com/sites/martaorosz/2020/03/16/these-are-the-billionaire-investors-behind-german-drugmakers-developing-a-coronavirus-vaccine/?sh=7860032b1fb8
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ImpactAlpha, Nov. 10, 2020 The Gates Foundation’s $55 million equity investment last fall into a German biotech company could have big payoff: an effective vaccine for COVID-19 and a breakthrough in vaccine technology for infectious diseases more broadly.
The foundation’s investment, made months before the arrival of the novel coronavirus, was intended to steer German biotech company BioNTech and its breakthrough approach toward vaccines and immunotherapies for tuberculosis and HIV. In the race for a COVID vaccine, BioNTech provided its ‘messenger RNA’ technology platform to Pfizer, which this week reported positive early results from its COVID vaccine trial. https://impactalpha.com/gates-foundations-role-in-pfizers-promising-covid-vaccine-is-part-of-a-strategy-not-a-conspiracy/
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To understand why billionaires are a sign of moral and economic failure, look no further than the Covid-19 pandemic.
Drug corporations could earn $190 billion from Covid-19 vaccine sales this year. pharmaceutical profits have minted nine new pandemic billionaires and helped eight existing billionaires enlarge their fortunes. Several of these are founders and private investors in three pharmaceutical corporations — Moderna, BioNTech and CureVac — whose vaccines use mRNA technology that was largely developed from publicly funded research (DARPA’s $33 million in 2013).
Moderna, BioNTech, and CureVac are each led by founders or longtime executives with a key role in company decision-making: Stéphane Bancel is Moderna’s CEO, Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin are BioNTech’s co-founders, and Franz-Werner Haas is CureVac’s CEO. In addition to getting head starts from publicly funded research these companies also relied on private investment provided through venture capital or family offices (privately held companies that handle investment and wealth management for wealthy families). Venture capital investors include Flagship Pioneering, a Boston-based firm whose founder, Noubar Afeyan, also serves as Moderna’s chair, and MIG AG, a German venture capital firm that made early investments in BioNTech. Other large investors in BioNTech and CureVac were German family offices, including investments by Dietmar Hopp in CureVac and the Struengmann brothers in BioNTech.
Founders, executives, venture capitalists, and family offices all held substantial ownership stakes in the three mRNA companies heading into the pandemic. All of them had a choice at the start of the pandemic: maximize profits or maximize low-cost, global production of vaccines.
The three firms chose profit maximization….The lipid nanoparticle, a critical ingredient of mRNA vaccines, emerged from publicly funded research conducted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Robert Langer who was a co-founder of Moderna. The pre-fusion spike protein used in mRNA vaccines was built by researchers at the National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center and Dartmouth College.
In addition governments, foundations and agencies have contributed more than $100 billion for development and manufacturing of medical countermeasures, including vaccines. The German government now owns a 23% stake in CureVac owing to a 300 million Euro investment.
Yet despite this substantial public subsidy, companies have not been required to share knowledge and promote equitable access. https://www.statnews.com/2021/06/12/if-vaccine-apartheid-exists-vaccine-billionaires-shouldnt/
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updated 6 years ago FRANKFURT/LONDON (Reuters)
In theory the promise of mRNA is enormous, ranging from cancer to infectious diseases to heart and kidney disorders since it could be used to tackle the 80 percent of proteins that are difficult to affect with existing medicines….
Privately-held CureVac in the university town of Tuebingen, which already has backing from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates thanks to its vaccine work, last week raised $110 million from new investors, valuing it at $1.6 billion. And Mainz-based BioNTech clinched a deal possibly worth up to $1.5 billion with Sanofi to use mRNA to fight cancer. BioNTech is owned by the Struengmann family who sold generic drugmaker Hexal to Novartis in 2005.
Driving the point home, the third International mRNA Health Conference is being held in Berlin this week. Moderna, CureVac and BioNTech are all sponsoring the event.
Today’s biotech medicines use complex proteins or antibodies to treat disease, while traditional tablets such as aspirin or Viagra are simple chemicals. Harnessing synthetic mRNA is a different model altogether.
In effect mRNA serves as software that can be injected into the body to instruct ribosomes, the “3D-printers” found inside cells, to churn out desired proteins. “This is a radically different approach from conventional approaches, where therapeutic proteins are produced outside the human body and active ingredients need to be isolated, purified and cooled and then be inserted back into the human body at great complexity and cost,” said CureVac co-founder and CEO Ingmar Hoerr.
Single-stranded RNA, which helps to relay information encoded in double-helix DNA molecules, for a long time attracted only academic interest because it was seen as too unstable to handle.
But advances in chemistry have increased both stability and potency, paving the way to the creation of potential drugs, although big challenges remain to prove their clinical value….
Moderna has yet to start clinical trials, although it has ambitious plans for parallel studies with multiple drug candidates, alongside partners including AstraZeneca, Merck and Alexion. Marcus Schindler, vice president for cardiovascular and metabolic drug discovery at AstraZeneca, is particularly excited about the promise of mRNA in producing a radical new treatment for heart failure, by regenerating cardiac tissue. AstraZeneca plans to start testing mRNA as an agent to improve coronary blood flow in human trials in 2016. This follows promising data in animals that suggests synthetic mRNA can be delivered accurately and produce the right amount of protein.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-biotech-messenger-molecule/germany-u-s-in-hot-pursuit-of-messenger-drug-molecules-idUSKCN0T114420151112
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