Valneva and VBI Vaccines have announced a partnership in select European markets for the marketing and distribution of PreHevbri – the only 3-antigen hepatitis B vaccine approved in Europe.

Under the terms of the agreement, specialty vaccine company Valneva will promote and distribute PreHevbri throughout select European countries, which initially includes the UK, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Belgium and the Netherlands.  The two companies expect PreHevbri to be available in these countries in early 2023.

PreHevbri was approved by the European Commission and the United Kingdom Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency in the second quarter of 2022 for active immunisation against infection caused by all known subtypes of the hepatitis B virus in adults.

Thomas Lingelbach, President and CEO of Valneva, reflected: “We welcome this partnership with VBI, which underlines Valneva’s expertise in vaccine commercialisation. Over the past years, we have continued to develop our third-party vaccine marketing and distribution activities further, notably with the signing of a distribution agreement with Bavarian Nordic in 2020, and we are extremely pleased to add VBI’s hepatitis B vaccine to this portfolio.”

Hepatitis B is one of the world’s most significant infectious disease threats with more than 290 million people infected globally.

HeartBeat.bio – a company developing cardiac organoids for drug discovery – and Molecular Devices, a provider of life sciences solutions, have entered into a co-development agreement.

With cardiovascular diseases the leading cause of death worldwide – claiming 34 lives every minute – and cardiotoxicity a major cause of drug withdrawals, the partnership will provide automated solutions to better model disease physiology, discover novel drug targets and test cardiac toxicity.

It will incorporate 3D cell cultures that more accurately represent human biology as compared to traditional animal models. Meanwhile, the commercialised offering will enable researchers to reliably scale production of cardioids, advance cardiac drug discovery and boost compatibility with Molecular Devices’ existing solutions.

The Molecular Devices platform built around HeartBeat.bio’s Cardioid technology is expected to improve preclinical research, leading to higher clinical trial success rates along with reduced costs and time for compound development.

“By collaborating with HeartBeat.bio, we’ll equip more researchers with the physiologically-relevant cell models, automated bioimaging technology, and reproducible workflows needed to drive development of novel heart disease treatments and reduce cardiovascular safety risk of drugs entering clinical trials,” concluded Susan Murphy, president of Molecular Devices.

With a leading pharmaceutical company already identified to help validate the offering for cardiac drug safety, the companies are open to additional tests and assessments regarding the predictive value of the platform as compared to other drug development methods.