It takes a lot of negotiation with regulators, advisory boards, and alignment between commercial and portfolio management teams to define and agree a clinical trial protocol. Why on earth would companies change it once a study is underway?

The company will shift development of INO-4800 to a booster strategy. It also announced it must conduct additional studies of the cervical dysplasia drug VGX-3100 after an FDA meeting.

AbbVie pays $130m up front with up to $870m in earnout potential for UCB spinout focused on SV2A modulators. BioNTech gets rights to preclinical TCR candidates for solid tumors from Medigene.

The operating environment for medical technology companies becomes more complex, competitive and costly every year. There is no expectation that 2022 will buck that trend, even as the medtech sector prepares for a third year of working under conditions shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic.