The 8-year-old vaccine maker focuses on addressing unmet medical needs.
OXFORD, United Kingdom, March 17, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Vaccitech Ltd (“Vaccitech”), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company engaged in the discovery and development of novel immunotherapeutics and vaccines for the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases and cancer, today announces that it has raised $168 million in a Series B financing. This includes $43 million in convertible loan notes previously issued by Vaccitech that converted into Series B shares.
The Series B financing round was led by M&G Investment Management (part of M&G plc), with further participation from new investors including Tencent, Gilead Sciences, Monaco Constitutional Reserve Fund, and Future Planet Capital among others. The Series B financing round was also supported by existing investors, including Oxford Sciences Innovation.
Four Johns Hopkins professors have received grants for their research through the Bisciotti Foundation Translational Fund.
Established with a generous multiyear gift from the Stephen and Renee Bisciotti Foundation, the fund provides $300,000 annually in seed money to advance Johns Hopkins discoveries on a commercial path. Recipients are awarded from $25,000 and $100,000 to conduct their work during a period of up to nine months.
Image: The faculty winners of prizes from the Bisciotti Foundation Translational Fund are (clockwise from top left) Vivek Kumbhari, Xingde Li, Sung Hoon Kang, and Alan Cohen
A year ago, just before the start of pandemic lockdowns, some 10% or less of the U.S. labor force worked remotely full-time. Within a month, according to Gallup and other surveys, around half of American workers were at distant desktops. Today, most of them still are. And surveys of employers and employees alike suggest a fundamental shift. While forecasts differ, as much as a quarter of the 160-million-strong U.S. labor force is expected to stay fully remote in the long term, and many more are likely to work remotely a significant part of the time.
Image: ILLUSTRATION: JAMES GULLIVER HANCOCK – https://www-wsj-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/how-remote-work-is-reshaping-americas-urban-geography-11614960100
CHICAGO/FRANKFURT • The chief scientist of Johnson & Johnson said the company expects to produce up to three billion doses of its Covid-19 jab next year, after the European Union (EU) approved the one-shot vaccine on Thursday.
The company is bringing on three manufacturing plants to produce the key drug substance for the vaccine. It will also have seven plants globally to handle the “fill and finish” – the final production steps and bottling into vials.
IonQ, a quantum computing startup born in College Park, announced Monday that it would likely soon become the first publicly traded company to specialize in commercialized quantum computing.
The company plans to file paperwork with the Securities Exchange Commission in the next week, which will allow it to go public on the New York Stock Exchange through an acquisition deal that would set the valuation of the combined entity to nearly $2 billion.
Image: The IonQ headquarters in College Park on Nov. 9, 2020. (Kurt Leinemann/The Diamondback)
The past year has been the most important in Emergent BioSolutions’ history. We’ve had the honor of helping our country address Covid-19, manufacturing vaccines in a way few companies can. Deploying longstanding pandemic preparedness capabilities to shorten timelines and ramp up large-scale manufacturing, we can now make more than a billion doses of Covid-19 vaccine a year.
GAITHERSBURG, Md., March 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — US-based biotech company VLP Therapeutics, Inc. (VLPT) announced that it has named Ms. Miwa Toyoda, formerly a venture capitalist specialized in pharma and biotech at JAFCO Group Co., Ltd., as chief business officer, effective March 15, in a bid to accelerate its vaccine research and development projects and expand the portfolio.
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