| | | |   | Today we've got wind of a new White House initiative to develop next-generation Covid vaccines, and discuss the University of Pennsylvania's strange new NFT. Have a lovely week!
- Meghana | | | The Biden administration’s new vaccine initiative The Biden administration is launching an initiative to develop a new generation of Covid-19 vaccines, a top White House official tells STAT. Top federal officials, scientists, and biopharma execs — including those from Pfizer and Moderna — will be gathering Tuesday at a “summit” to discuss how to develop a more potent round of immunizations. “These are vaccines that are going to be far more durable, that are going to provide far longer-lasting protection, no matter what the virus does or how it evolves," Ashish Jha, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator, said in an interview. “If we can drive down infections by 90%, Covid becomes just another respiratory illness.” Jha acknowledged that this sort of campaign would probably require more money from Congress, though didn’t provide an estimate. It’d likely cost billions. Read more. | Moderna is driving up the Boston real estate market The windfall from Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine has helped amply Boston’s real estate market, the Wall Street Journal writes. The company had to triple its headcount in Boston to develop the vaccine and manufacture it quickly — and it paid the new employees well. These new hires have needed homes, and some executives have even been looking to one-up Boston-based employees of competitor Pfizer. Downtown Boston is seeing a boom in high-priced condos, and even outposts like Provincetown in Cape Cod are attracting Moderna employees. “There’s a lot of wealth in the region that’s just unlocking a bit,” said one real estate dealer. In June, the median luxury sale price in the greater Boston area was $2.2 million — up 15.79% from a year previous and nearly 30% from June 2020. | STAT E-Book: How technology is changing the face of medicine The 2022 STAT Health Tech Summit brought together the most prominent leaders working at the intersection of health and technology. Our latest e-book lays out the most pressing issues in health care that tech could help solve, the exciting new ideas to make that happen, and the barriers to pulling them off. | Consulting with Indigenous people for psychedelic meds The potential of psychedelic medicines is becoming increasingly evident. Though they’ve been around for millennia, biopharma companies have only recently begun to realize their therapeutic — and financial — value. But it’s important that the industry partners with the Indigenous communities that have been using these medicines successfully for generations, opines Jeeshan Chowdhury, a physician-scientist who is trained in psychedelic-assisted therapy. “To date, only Indigenous communities have been able to responsibly scale up psychedelic technologies,” he writes. “Working alongside them and including them in governance structures is the right way forward for companies in this sphere, enabling them to not only make more ethical decisions, but safer ones.” Read more. | An NFT for an mRNA vaccine… video Well, this is different. The University of Pennsylvania is selling a non-fungible token at Christie’s meant to “[memorialize] the pioneering work” of two of its mRNA researchers who work laid the groundwork for mRNA vaccine technology. Specifically, the NFT is a 3D, captioned video that shows the mechanics of the vaccine technology, dreamed up by Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó more than 20 years ago. The video is accompanied by a copy of the original patent documents. Starting bid is… $50,000. Any takers? | More reads - Poorer nations need assurances of dedicated vaccine supplies before the next pandemic, STAT
- Four brain-computer interface companies you should watch (other than Neuralink), STAT
| Thanks for reading! Until tomorrow,  | | | |
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