How do you send 90,000 employees home and still bring a COVID-19 vaccine to market in record time? Pfizer showed the way and at a recent virtual event, senior vice-president Robert Brown revealed how the "secret sauce" of digitalization continues to help cut medical legal review times, crunch clinical trial duration and reduce service interruptions.

GSK takes equity stake in Spero, and global rights to tebipenem except for certain Asian markets. Merck KGaA gets rights to Nerviano’s next-generation PARP inhibitor for cancer.

President Biden’s informal declaration that the COVID-19 pandemic is ‘over’ likely portends a formal end of the Public Health Emergency. But many of the US FDA’s COVID flexibilities don’t directly depend on that decision.

AnGes has terminated R&D work on a DNA vaccine for COVID-19 and will now look at intranasal candidates with a US partner. Although the original project received funding from the Japanese government, a spike in related costs caused the Japanese firm's net loss to triple last year, and the decision represents the latest in a string of pipeline setbacks.