Sanofi's coronavirus vaccine is left out in the cold

President Trump’s coronavirus vaccine initiative, called Operation Warp Speed, has chosen five projects to prioritize, omitting a certain French pharmaceutical giant from the list.

As the New York Times reports, the winning ideas come from Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, and AstraZeneca. Each will be eligible for federal funding and logistical support. Among the high-profile programs left out are vaccines from Sanofi, Inovio Pharmaceuticals, and Novavax.

Sanofi’s exclusion stands out. Unlike Moderna, Sanofi has decades of experience successfully developing vaccines. And unlike Pfizer and AstraZeneca, it’s using a technology that has led to FDA-approved products. There’s also the awkward detail that Paul Hudson, Sanofi’s British CEO, told Bloomberg last month that the U.S. would be first in line for the company’s vaccine “because it’s invested in taking the risk.”

Moderna was vague about its vaccine to prevent leaks and please journals, CEO says

Last month, Moderna released a peak at results on its coronavirus vaccine, frustrating and perplexing many experts. That decision, CEO Stéphane Bancel said yesterday, was driven by a desire to avoid leaks and preserve a future publication.

Speaking at a Jefferies event, Bancel made the case for Moderna’s controversial decision to disclose qualitative statements rather than actual data. When the company got word about the early results, it deemed the news material, meaning it needed to be made public before anyone might leak it, Bancel said. And, because Moderna’s partners at the NIH intend to publish the full dataset in a medical journal, the company decided to disclose only top-line information, he said.

Whether that explanation satisfies Moderna’s many skeptics remains to be seen. The full publication is expected in the coming weeks, by which point the company, which raised more than $1 billion in a stock sale last month, will be well into a Phase 2 trial.

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At last, a victory for epitranscriptomics

Among science’s many -omics, epitranscriptomics undoubtedly has the most syllables. Now, thanks to an investment from AstraZeneca, it also has the co-sign of a major pharma company.

As STAT’s Kate Sheridan reports, AstraZeneca has partnered with a company called Accent Therapeutics to mine the epitranscriptome, which covers all the enzymes that make minor tweaks to RNA to shape human biology.

The deal is worth $55 million up front with more than $1 billion tied to future milestones. The first target is cancer, and Accent has isolated an enzyme called METTL3 that, true to its name, tinkers with RNA to promote tumor growth.

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What do we mean when we say ‘survival?’

What seems like a simple enough concept in day-to-day life turns out to be thorny when it comes to oncology. The goal of any new cancer treatment is to prolong survival compared to whatever else is out there, but how do you measure survival?

STAT’s Adam Feuerstein hosted a virtual chat yesterday to recap the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting, and things got a little semiotic.

“Oncologists are the only people in the world who think there are different flavors of survival,” said George Demetri, director of the Sarcoma Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. There’s progression-free survival, disease-free survival, and then there’s actually living longer. When you break down the differences to patients, “they look at you like you’re from Mars,” Demetri said.

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