At the Clinical Trials Plenary Session at the 2022 AACR Annual Meeting, Dr. John Haanen, M.D., Ph.D., of the Netherlands Cancer Institute presented data from BioNTech’s ongoing first-in-human Phase I/II trial of the company’s CAR-T cell therapy BNT211 in patients with advanced solid tumors.

BioNTech announced an expansion of a collaboration with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals to continue advancing mRNA technology and develop the FixVac candidate BNT116 in combination with Regeneron and Sanofi’s shared pharmaceutical product Libtayo (cemiplimab) for non-small cell lung cancer.

Sanofi agreed to buy U.S. biotech company Translate Bio in a $3.2 billion deal, as the French pharmaceuticals firm bets on next-generation mRNA vaccine technology beyond the Covid-19 pandemic, confirming a Reuters exclusive report.

Moderna

Shares of Autolus Therapeutics were up in trading after the company announced an exclusive licensing agreement with Moderna to develop new messenger RNA therapeutics for cancer.

Building on the success of the company’s mRNA research, BioNTech will establish its first regional hub in the Asia Pacific region. The company will open a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility to support a global supply of mRNA-based vaccines and therapeutics in Singapore.

Moderna

Moderna Inc. and Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated announced a new strategic research collaboration and licensing agreement aimed at the discovery and development of lipid nanoparticles and mRNAs for the delivery of gene-editing therapies for the treatment of cystic fibrosis (CF).

Strand Therapeutics is genetically programming RNA not just to deliver a gene of interest, but to control the location, timing and intensity of therapeutic protein expression using mRNA-encoded logic circuits.

Tianjin, China’s CanSino Biologics entered into a co-development agreement with Vancouver, British Columbia’s Precision NanoSystems for an mRNA lipid nanoparticle vaccine against COVID-19.

The software of life is how Moderna Inc. CEO Stephane Bancel describes messenger RNA (mRNA), which is at the core of the company’s drug development process.

Cambridge, Mass.-based Dicerna Pharmaceuticals signed a research collaboration and licensing deal with Switzerland’s Roche for chronic hepatitis B virus therapies that could hit $1.67 billion.