Unlike previous years, the 39th J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference was not held in San Francisco, but took place virtually through video conferencing. Between the closing of the 2020 J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference and January 2021, the pharmaceutical industry had to face a global pandemic. But in spite of lockdowns, social distancing restrictions, economic breakdown, the pharma industry recorded an amazing 2020 year in terms of acquisitions and partnerships..

Year-to-date tally at the European Medicines Agency (EMA) suggests the trend for new drug approvals in 2020 hasn't suffered from the Covid-19 pandemic. At the end of the 11 Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) meetings, some 96 new medicines were approved in Europe throughout the year.

As Commissioner Stephen Hahn will depart the FDA by January 20, when the Biden administration takes office, review of drug approvals in 2020 shows the Covid-19 pandemic did not slow the trend. According to the FDA, the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research approved 53 "first-of-their-kind medicines" for the US market....

AstraZeneca's $39 billion acquisition of Alexion strengthens several assumptions: firstly, rare-disease segment is more and more becoming a key issue for big and small pharmaceutical companies; secondly mega-deals are not over (it is the largest deal in AstraZeneca's history). And thirdly, there is still future for the pharmaceutical industry outside Covid-19 R&D.

EQT IX, through Roar BidCo AB, announced a public offering of SEK 220 in cash per share to the shareholders of Recipharm AB and SEK 1,427,010 per Recipharm convertible bond with a par value of 1 000,000 SEK.

The R&D on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments is not the only goal of Big Pharma. Interest in gene therapy development remains very high, as evidenced by several recent deals and agreements.

European CDMOs are becoming essential players in producing the hundreds of millions of doses of anti-Covid-19 vaccines.

Curevac NV and Fareva today announced their agreement for the Fill & Finish manufacture of CVnCoV, CureVac's COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

While Pfizer/BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine candidate gained emergency use authorization in the UK on December 2, making it the first in Europe to get the green light, what happened in the rest of the pharma-industry? Many things for sure, as all companies are not exclusively working on vaccines.

AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford are likely to conduct a further global study of their Covid-19 vaccine candidate AZD1222, which would evaluate an initial low-dose of the vaccine...

Humanity is faced with an unprecedented vaccination effort in order to achieve collective immunity close to 70%, or 5.5 billion people worldwide! Over 10 billion doses will need to be produced over time! Either by optimizing at best, in sterile vials of 10 doses, this represents a billion vials to be filled, packaged, stored, and sent to the places where the vaccine doses are distributed.

ApiJect Systems, Corp., has been approved by the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) for a $590 million loan to construct a multi-facility campus enabling the U.S. to more quickly package high volumes of injectable medicines and vaccines...

American pharmacies and drugstore chains have a formidable new competitor: Amazon. The giants of the sector, CVS, Walgreens and RiteAid, but also the pharmacies of large low-cost distribution, such as Walmart and Costco, have been expecting for months such an official announcement, likely to upset the market of 300 billion dollars from the sale of drugs in the United States....

The path is gradually clearing for laboratories battling against Covid-19. And the race to bring a vaccine to the market has dramatically sped up during the past weeks with several announcements by Pfizer and Moderna....

While the giants of drug and biotechnology manufacturers are working in a frantic race on the projects of vaccine candidates, many manufacturing contracts are under negotiation in order to meet the production capacities to be implemented.

The European Health Union is on track; mid-November European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen offered a €5 billion budget dedicated to health over the next seven years...

Will aducanumab become one day the first medication approved for Alzheimer? What happened last week confirms if needed that the story has not been written yet and that the cycle failure is not over...

Were the Top 10 best-selling pharmaceutical drugs in the world impacted by social distancing measures, delays in elective surgeries, prioritization of Covid-19 patients during the first nine months of 2020? As most drugmakers have just announced their third quarter results, it is clear that Big Pharma's resilience is a reality, while blockbusters still make their way...

Results from the first interim analysis of a Phase III study of Pfizer and BioNTech's BNT162b2 have raised huge enthusiasm all over the world as the pandemic is speeding up, forcing governments to enact new lockdowns. ...

While the Covid-19 pandemic shows no sign of decrease and accelerates on the contrary dramatically in many parts of the world, urging governments to set up more restrictive measures, several drugmanufacturers raise hopes for potential coronavirus vaccines or treatments in the coming weeks or months.

The country is becoming more and more a worldwide turntable for R&D and trials against the pandemic.

The pandemic and the economic lockdown severely reduced prescriptions for medicines, doctors or hospitals visits by patients and also delayed uses of innovative treatments. With immediate financial consequences on companies' sales and revenues.

Fareva enters into exclusive negotiations with Novartis to take over the production site in Unterach (Upper Austria), recognized as the center of excellence for the manufacture of injectable cancer drugs.