Hal Bar­ron’s an­ti-ag­ing biotech has added Vir Biotech­nol­o­gy CSO Her­bert “Skip” Vir­gin to its ranks. At the Rick Klaus­ner-found­ed Al­tos Labs, Vir­gin will lead the Al­tos In­sti­tute of Med­i­cine as med­ical chief.

The ex­ec­u­tive will leave Vir at the end of Au­gust af­ter near­ly five years at the biotech work­ing on treat­ments for Covid-19, HIV, HBV and flu, the San Fran­cis­co com­pa­ny said Thurs­day morn­ing.

Vir­gin will join Al­tos, fund­ed with bil­lions of dol­lars and sci­en­tif­ic ex­per­tise from the likes of CRISPR pi­o­neer Jen­nifer Doud­na, to lead the por­tion of the biotech tasked with cap­tur­ing “knowl­edge gen­er­at­ed about cell health and pro­gram­ming to de­vel­op trans­for­ma­tive med­i­cines,” as the Al­tos In­sti­tute of Med­i­cine was char­ac­ter­ized in the Jan­u­ary launch press re­lease.

Pri­or to Vir, Vir­gin spent most of his ca­reer in acad­e­mia, serv­ing on the fac­ul­ty of Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty School of Med­i­cine from 1990 to ear­ly 2019. — Kyle LaHu­cik

Bob Dug­gan’s Sum­mit Ther­a­peu­tics and the FDA try to make head­way

It has been a wild ride for in­vestor Bob Dug­gan’s Sum­mit Ther­a­peu­tics, but it looks like the com­pa­ny is try­ing to make head­way with the FDA af­ter hav­ing drift­ed in­to the pen­ny stock zone.

Ac­cord­ing to the biotech, Sum­mit and the FDA held a Type C meet­ing this week.  Sum­mit dis­cussed cer­tain da­ta from the Ri-CoD­I­Fy Phase III clin­i­cal tri­al with the agency and both par­ties dis­cussed a pos­si­ble path­way in which to ad­vance ri­dini­la­zole. The com­pa­ny said that this po­ten­tial path would like­ly in­volve at least one ad­di­tion­al clin­i­cal tri­al.

A re­lease from the com­pa­ny said the biotech is plan­ning to ex­plore this pos­si­bil­i­ty.

The com­pa­ny and the FDA have crossed swords be­fore. In 2021, Sum­mit an­nounced its in­tent to com­bine two Phase III stud­ies for ri­dini­la­zole in­to one tri­al in a process that in­volved chang­ing the pri­ma­ry end­point, but reg­u­la­tors did not agree with the new end­point. —Tyler Patchen