Marks And Spencer Dividends - MKS

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Stock Name	Stock Symbol	Market	Stock Type	Stock ISIN	Stock Description
Marks And Spencer Group Plc	MKS	London	Ordinary Share	GB0031274896	ORD 25P

	Price Change	Price Change %	Stock Price	Last Trade
	-1.78	-1.87%	93.46	16:35:12

Close Price	Low Price	High Price	Open Price	Previous Close
93.46	92.98	95.70	95.30	95.24

more quote information »

Industry Sector
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Marks And Spencer MKS Dividends History

Announcement Date	Type	Currency	Dividend Amount	Period Start	Period End	Ex Date	Record Date	Payment Date	Total Dividend Amount
06/11/2019	Interim	GBX	3.9	28/03/2019	28/03/2020	14/11/2019	15/11/2019	10/01/2020	3.9
22/05/2019	Final	GBX	7.1	30/03/2018	30/03/2019	30/05/2019	31/05/2019	12/07/2019	13.9
07/11/2018	Interim	GBX	6.8	29/03/2018	29/09/2018	15/11/2018	16/11/2018	11/01/2019	0
23/05/2018	Final	GBX	11.9	31/03/2017	31/03/2018	31/05/2018	01/06/2018	13/07/2018	18.7
08/11/2017	Interim	GBX	6.8	30/03/2017	30/09/2017	16/11/2017	17/11/2017	12/01/2018	0
24/05/2017	Final	GBX	11.9	01/04/2016	01/04/2017	01/06/2017	02/06/2017	14/07/2017	18.7
08/11/2016	Interim	GBX	6.8	01/04/2016	01/10/2016	17/11/2016	18/11/2016	13/01/2017	0
25/05/2016	Special	GBX	4.6	02/04/2015	02/04/2016	02/06/2016	03/06/2016	15/07/2016	0
25/05/2016	Final	GBX	11.9	02/04/2015	02/04/2016	02/06/2016	03/06/2016	15/07/2016	18.7
04/11/2015	Interim	GBX	6.8	26/03/2015	26/09/2015	12/11/2015	13/11/2015	08/01/2016	0
20/05/2015	Final	GBX	11.6	28/03/2014	28/03/2015	28/05/2015	29/05/2015	10/07/2015	18
05/11/2014	Interim	GBX	6.4	27/03/2014	27/09/2014	12/11/2014	13/11/2014	09/01/2015	0
20/05/2014	Final	GBX	10.8	29/03/2013	29/03/2014	28/05/2014	30/05/2014	11/07/2014	17
05/11/2013	Interim	GBX	6.2	28/03/2013	28/09/2013	13/11/2013	15/11/2013	10/01/2014	0
21/05/2013	Final	GBX	10.8	30/03/2012	30/03/2013	29/05/2013	31/05/2013	12/07/2013	17
06/11/2012	Interim	GBX	6.2	29/03/2012	29/09/2012	14/11/2012	16/11/2012	11/01/2013	0
22/05/2012	Final	GBX	10.8	31/03/2011	31/03/2012	30/05/2012	01/06/2012	13/07/2012	17
08/11/2011	Interim	GBX	6.2	01/04/2011	01/10/2011	16/11/2011	18/11/2011	13/01/2012	0
24/05/2011	Final	GBX	10.8	02/04/2010	02/04/2011	01/06/2011	03/06/2011	15/07/2011	17
09/11/2010	Interim	GBX	6.2	02/04/2010	02/10/2010	17/11/2010	19/11/2010	14/01/2011	0
25/05/2010	Final	GBX	9.5	03/04/2009	03/04/2010	02/06/2010	04/06/2010	16/07/2010	15
04/11/2009	Interim	GBX	5.5	26/03/2009	26/09/2009	11/11/2009	13/11/2009	09/01/2010	0
19/05/2009	Final	GBX	9.5	28/03/2008	28/03/2009	27/05/2009	29/05/2009	10/07/2009	15
04/11/2008	Interim	GBX	8.3	27/03/2008	27/09/2008	12/11/2008	14/11/2008	09/01/2008	0
20/05/2008	Final	GBX	14.2	29/03/2007	29/03/2008	28/05/2008	30/05/2008	11/07/2008	22.5
21/05/2007	Final	GBX	12	31/03/2006	31/03/2007	30/05/2007	01/06/2007	13/07/2007	18.3
07/11/2006	Interim	GBX	6.3	30/03/2006	30/09/2006	15/11/2006	17/11/2006	12/01/2007	0
23/05/2006	Final	GBX	9.2	01/04/2005	01/04/2006	31/05/2006	02/06/2006	14/07/2006	14
08/11/2005	Interim	GBX	4.8	01/04/2005	01/10/2005	16/11/2005	18/11/2005	13/01/2006	0
24/05/2005	Final	GBX	7.5	02/04/2004	02/04/2005	01/06/2005	03/06/2005	15/07/2005	12.1
09/11/2004	Interim	GBX	4.6	02/04/2004	02/10/2004	17/11/2004	19/11/2004	14/01/2005	0
25/02/2004	Final	GBX	7.1	03/04/2003	03/04/2004	02/06/2004	04/06/2004	16/07/2004	11.5
04/11/2003	Interim	GBX	4.4	27/03/2003	27/09/2003	12/11/2003	14/11/2003	09/01/2004	0
20/05/2003	Final	GBX	6.5	31/03/2002	31/03/2003	28/05/2003	30/05/2003	18/07/2003	10.5
05/11/2002	Interim	GBX	4	28/03/2002	28/09/2002	13/11/2002	15/11/2002	10/01/2003	0
21/05/2002	Final	GBX	5.8	30/03/2001	30/03/2002	29/05/2002	31/05/2002	19/07/2002	9.5
06/11/2001	Interim	GBX	3.7	29/03/2001	29/09/2001	14/11/2001	16/11/2001	11/01/2002	0
22/05/2001	Final	GBX	5.3	31/03/2000	31/03/2001	30/05/2001	01/06/2001	20/07/2001	9
07/11/2000	Interim	GBX	3.7	30/03/2000	30/09/2000	13/11/2000	17/11/2000	12/01/2001	0
30/05/2000	Final	GBX	5.3	01/04/1999	01/04/2000	01/06/2000	05/06/2000	04/08/2000	9
02/11/1999	Interim	GBX	3.7	25/03/1999	25/09/1999	08/11/1999	12/11/1999	14/01/2000	0
18/05/1999	Final	GBX	10.7	27/03/1998	27/03/1999	24/05/1999	28/05/1999	30/07/1999	14.4
03/11/1998	Interim	GBX	3.7	26/03/1998	26/09/1998	09/11/1998	13/11/1998	15/01/1999	0
19/05/1998	Final	GBX	10.7	31/03/1997	31/03/1998	26/05/1998	01/06/1998	31/07/1998	14.3

Top Dividend Posts

Date	Subject
26/10/2020 09:24	sick of it: Thank you Neil.Be aware that your posts are appreciated.Unlike the garbage posted here by some little minded people. I don't see their posts are they are obviously under IGNORE.Please keep posting MKS related info.I'm pleased about the recent share price strength in a generally weak market. Read Full Thread Follow Reply
26/10/2020 08:57	neilhumphreys: Ok. Director/PDMR Shareholding Latest Follow Feed Events Go to my Feed 23/10/2020 08:56 Breakout Marks And Spencer hit an upwards weekly price breakout. 22/10/2020 15:22 Breakout Marks And Spencer hit an upwards weekly price breakout. For readers who have followed my posts most will know I have a good handle on retailers predicting the demise of Debenhams. So what are my views? The dividend has been slashed its no longer a yield earner. At £1 there is 20% either way with more downside risk. Sharecast links: Https://www.sharecast.com/equity/Marks_Spencer_Group Marks will struggle the next 2 years unless management come up with new id albeit the forecast margin beats the main competition hands down. Coronavirus stats Https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ PlusOneCoin Top Posts None yet... PreviousGo ToTop Posts Neilhumphreys25 Oct '20 - 10:48 - 7078 of 7082 Edit 0 0 0 So important: To Find a Coronavirus Vaccine, GlaxoSmithKline Is Bonding With Its Biggest CompetitorsSource: Dow Jones NewsBy Joseph Walker The Covid-19 pandemic is turning some fierce drug-industry foes into the best of frenemies.The pharmaceutical giant standing at the center of this team of rivals is GlaxoSmithKline PLC, the world's largest vaccine maker by sales. The British company is jointly developing a Covid-19 antibody drug with a San Francisco upstart, offering rivals a proprietary ingredient that is designed to boost a vaccine's power and planning to share research study results."We felt this very unusual situation required something that GSK hadn't done before, and something we hadn't seen in the industry before either, " says Roger Connor, president of Glaxo's vaccines business.What makes Glaxo's collaboration so unusual is that competition typically defines the relationship among drugmakers. Company researchers race to be first to bring a new kind of therapy to market or work on treatments that can outdo older medicines, while marketers roll out campaigns designed to boost sales at the expense of rivals.In the age of Covid-19, old adversaries are uniting around a common enemy: the new coronavirus. Their nascent partnership is now visible in everything from trials to research to manufacturing. Glaxo and eight other pharmaceutical firms even took the rare step of issuing a joint pledge last month to seek regulatory approvals for their vaccines only after proving their safety and effectiveness in large, final-stage clinical trials.The most common area of cooperation thus far is manufacturing. Some longtime rivals are striking deals to stretch their capacity to meet anticipated demand. Roche Holding AG is helping manufacture an antiviral drug in development by rival Regeneron. Amgen Inc. will help make Eli Lilly & Co.'s antiviral drugs if the treatments are authorized by regulators. Pfizer has dedicated manufacturing capacity to turning out doses of remdesivir, an antiviral made by rival Gilead Sciences Inc.The camaraderie also extends to the traditionally cutthroat realm of research. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. scientists contributed to research on a vaccine in development by BioNTech SE and Pfizer Inc., and were co-authors on a paper this summer detailing the results. In another rare move, Merck & Co.'s research and development chief called his Glaxo counterpartment in April to pass along a tip that one of Glaxo's molecules showed promise in Merck's Covid-19 lab tests.Glaxo's most prominent contribution to this new era of collaboration is its decision to share a proprietary vaccine component known as an adjuvant -- an ingredient that helps boost a vaccine's protective power by rousing the body's immune response. Glaxo now has agreements to supply that ingredient to four vaccine developers, including French drugmaker Sanofi SA, and stands ready to produce one billion doses of its adjuvant next year. It normally produces tens of millions annually.Some analysts say the company could enjoy benefits from selling its adjuvant for Covid-19 shots without impairing its lucrative vaccine business. "There is political capital to be gained from what they're doing, and there may be some financial returns to be had as well," says Andrew Baum, a Citigroup Inc. analyst who follows health care.Glaxo says it doesn't expect to profit from its Covid-19 vaccine collaborations during the pandemic, and it will invest any short-term profits in coronavirus research and pandemic preparedness."The adjuvant can be equally important -- maybe crucial -- to the vaccine being effective," says Hal Barron, Glaxo's chief scientific officer and president of R&D. "We thought that's where our unique opportunity to make a difference could be.The Team of RivalsThe alliance among drugmakers took hold in mid March as Glaxo closed labs amid a sharp uptick in Covid-19 infections around the world. Suddenly, Dr. Barron had to figure out how to run a global R&D organization under lockdown. He and his team debated which workers should be deemed essential and continue to work on-site, and which clinical trials should be paused and which ones to continue."I've never been in a situation like this," he says. "I wasn't sure what the right thing to do was."Dr. Barron called Mathai Mammen, a friend who heads drug research and development at Johnson & Johnson. They compared notes on how to decide which drug studies to pause and which scientists were essential enough to continue coming in to the office. Toward the end of the call, Dr. Mammen invited Dr. Barron to join a larger group of R&D chiefs to share information about the virus and approaches to drug development, Dr. Barron says.Glaxo had a potentially critical role to play in the response to Covid-19, as one of the world's largest vaccine sellers. Sales of its shots totaled about $9.4 billion last year, the most of any of the top four vaccine-makers globally. The company also had a history of rallying its employees to respond to pandemics. In the years leading up to the 2009 swine flu pandemic, it spent $3.2 billion on R&D, acquisitions and manufacturing in preparation for a flu pandemic.On Sunday, March 8, many of the biggest drugmakers convened for a group call. Aside from Drs. Barron and Mammen, participants included the heads of research from AstraZeneca PLC, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Novartis AG, recalls Andrew Plump, president of R&D at Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., who was also on the call."Things were happening so, so quickly, with organizations closing down and quarantining, and beginning work-from-home policies," recalls Dr. Plump. "We were all scrambling. And there was also an immense amount of interest in all of us stepping up and trying to provide solutions."By the end of that call, the research bosses resolved to keep the virtual meetings going and to open up the group to other companies and, occasionally, government officials such as Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and officials from Operation Warp Speed, a $10 billion U.S. government initiative to speed the development of drugs and vaccines for Covid-19. For months, they met regularly using videoconferencing software.Concerns about running afoul of antitrust regulations were alleviated when federal regulators made it clear that research cooperation in the fight against Covid-19 was permissible. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission issued a joint statement on March 24 stating "there are many ways firms, including competitors, can engage in procompetitive collaboration that does not violate the antitrust laws."With that statement, "we felt that we had enough cover to do what we needed to do," says Dr. Plump.The group established a mandate to tackle short-term problems, such as developing reliable laboratory tests to screen the thousands of drug molecules the companies had stored in their libraries against the coronavirus. They also agreed to dramatically increase the speed at which they shared clinical trial data with one another, posting the anonymized data within one week of receiving results from their Covid-19 studies. Outside researchers are allowed to scrutinize the data to learn more about the virus.The Big PictureGlaxo began reaching partnerships on its own, too. One developed from a call Dr. Barron received in mid March from his friend George Scangos, chief executive of a small San Francisco drug-developer with a focus on infectious diseases.Dr. Scangos asked whether Glaxo would be interested in collaborating with his company, Vir Biotechnology Inc., on a Covid-19 monoclonal antibody drug that is engineered to mimic the natural antibodies the immune system makes to fight the virus."If we're going to do this, we need to go fast, because every day matters," Dr. Scangos recalls saying.Usually, such deals might take several months to a year to hammer out. Dr. Scangos and Dr. Barron set a goal of signing an agreement within three weeks.Some of the calls involved saying, "OK, if that's important to George -- done," recalls Dr. Barron. "And he would say, 'OK, if that's important to you, done. Let's move this thing along. Can't lose the big picture.'"The companies announced a deal on April 6, within 18 days of starting negotiations. Under the terms, Glaxo would purchase a $250 million stake in Vir at $37.73 a share, a 41% premium to the company's average share price over the previous three months. Clinical trials are under way and the companies expect potential authorization for the drug in the first half of 2021.One TeamGlaxo was even more aggressive in its pursuit of vaccine makers that wanted access to its adjuvant, the ingredient that boosts the immune response to a vaccine.One was Sanofi, which said in February it was developing a Covid-19 vaccine candidate. Mr. Connor called David Loew, the head of Sanofi's vaccine unit, to see if the French drugmaker would be interested in pairing its vaccine with Glaxo's adjuvant."This is an unusual call to have, but this is an unusual circumstance," Mr. Connor recalls telling Mr. Loew during the initial call, in March.Executives say the company settled on its adjuvant strategy as a way to contribute to the Covid-19 response without losing focus on its pre-pandemic mission of reinvigorating the company's product pipeline or disrupting its existing vaccine manufacturing supply chain. The company's senior management had been overhauled a few years earlier amid shareholder disillusionment over the company's mixed record in launching new blockbuster drugs. Its adjuvant was already proven to work with other vaccines, reducing its risk, and would be less of a manufacturing logistical challenge.During pandemics, adjuvants are especially valuable because they can increase the potency of vaccines, allowing companies to produce more doses from each batch it manufactures. Glaxo's adjuvant, called AS03, is a combination of vitamin E and liver oil taken from sharks. The company used it to enhance the effectiveness of its vaccine for the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.To find partners for its adjuvant, Glaxo launched an internal project led by a team of Glaxo drug hunters who looked for anyone working on a key vaccine component -- a protein known as an antigen -- that would cause a person's immune system to build up defenses against the new coronavirus. The hope was that people who got the antigen through vaccination would develop antibodies and perhaps other defenses that could protect against Covid-19.Glaxo's drug hunters mapped every antigen in the works for Covid-19 using squares on a PowerPoint slide. Every square contained the name of a potential partner, details about the vaccine and a contact person who had spoken with Glaxo. The slide resembled a digital quilt, with some 100 squares.Some in the quilt approached Glaxo seeking help. Glaxo reached out to others. The campaign was "quite unusual for us," says Mr. Connor. "Going out and offering it to the world was something quite, quite different."On that first call with Sanofi, Mr. Connor said he remembers telling Mr. Loew: "'There is an opportunity here for us to do something together, which means that we could ultimately go faster for the world and make a difference to the common enemy, which is the virus itself.'"Within 36 hours, they agreed to create a joint task force that would start exchanging information and planning how to make the partnership work while the companies worked out a formal agreement. "We knew that the world was waiting," Mr. Connor says.Initial meetings, held by videoconference among employees across multiple time zones, were "slightly awkward" as the rivals turned teammates felt each other out, said Thomas Triomphe, Sanofi's executive vice president for vaccines.The companies hope to have results from early-stage studies in late November or early December, Mr. Triomphe said. They aim to start a 30,000-person study by the end of the year and to have the vaccine approved in the first half of 2021, he says."When you're facing a public-health crisis there is no team with a blue T-shirt and a team with an orange T-shirt. Very quickly, there was only one team," Mr. Triomphe said. spud Neilhumphreys25 Oct '20 - 11:03 - 7079 of 7082 Edit 0 0 0 So important ignorance is corrected: To Find a Coronavirus Vaccine, GlaxoSmithKline Is Bonding With Its Biggest CompetitorsSource: Dow Jones NewsBy Joseph Walker The Covid-19 pandemic is turning some fierce drug-industry foes into the best of frenemies.The pharmaceutical giant standing at the center of this team of rivals is GlaxoSmithKline PLC, the world's largest vaccine maker by sales. The British company is jointly developing a Covid-19 antibody drug with a San Francisco upstart, offering rivals a proprietary ingredient that is designed to boost a vaccine's power and planning to share research study results."We felt this very unusual situation required something that GSK hadn't done before, and something we hadn't seen in the industry before either, " says Roger Connor, president of Glaxo's vaccines business.What makes Glaxo's collaboration so unusual is that competition typically defines the relationship among drugmakers. Company researchers race to be first to bring a new kind of therapy to market or work on treatments that can outdo older medicines, while marketers roll out campaigns designed to boost sales at the expense of rivals.In the age of Covid-19, old adversaries are uniting around a common enemy: the new coronavirus. Their nascent partnership is now visible in everything from trials to research to manufacturing. Glaxo and eight other pharmaceutical firms even took the rare step of issuing a joint pledge last month to seek regulatory approvals for their vaccines only after proving their safety and effectiveness in large, final-stage clinical trials.The most common area of cooperation thus far is manufacturing. Some longtime rivals are striking deals to stretch their capacity to meet anticipated demand. Roche Holding AG is helping manufacture an antiviral drug in development by rival Regeneron. Amgen Inc. will help make Eli Lilly & Co.'s antiviral drugs if the treatments are authorized by regulators. Pfizer has dedicated manufacturing capacity to turning out doses of remdesivir, an antiviral made by rival Gilead Sciences Inc.The camaraderie also extends to the traditionally cutthroat realm of research. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. scientists contributed to research on a vaccine in development by BioNTech SE and Pfizer Inc., and were co-authors on a paper this summer detailing the results. In another rare move, Merck & Co.'s research and development chief called his Glaxo counterpartment in April to pass along a tip that one of Glaxo's molecules showed promise in Merck's Covid-19 lab tests.Glaxo's most prominent contribution to this new era of collaboration is its decision to share a proprietary vaccine component known as an adjuvant -- an ingredient that helps boost a vaccine's protective power by rousing the body's immune response. Glaxo now has agreements to supply that ingredient to four vaccine developers, including French drugmaker Sanofi SA, and stands ready to produce one billion doses of its adjuvant next year. It normally produces tens of millions annually.Some analysts say the company could enjoy benefits from selling its adjuvant for Covid-19 shots without impairing its lucrative vaccine business. "There is political capital to be gained from what they're doing, and there may be some financial returns to be had as well," says Andrew Baum, a Citigroup Inc. analyst who follows health care.Glaxo says it doesn't expect to profit from its Covid-19 vaccine collaborations during the pandemic, and it will invest any short-term profits in coronavirus research and pandemic preparedness."The adjuvant can be equally important -- maybe crucial -- to the vaccine being effective," says Hal Barron, Glaxo's chief scientific officer and president of R&D. "We thought that's where our unique opportunity to make a difference could be.The Team of RivalsThe alliance among drugmakers took hold in mid March as Glaxo closed labs amid a sharp uptick in Covid-19 infections around the world. Suddenly, Dr. Barron had to figure out how to run a global R&D organization under lockdown. He and his team debated which workers should be deemed essential and continue to work on-site, and which clinical trials should be paused and which ones to continue."I've never been in a situation like this," he says. "I wasn't sure what the right thing to do was."Dr. Barron called Mathai Mammen, a friend who heads drug research and development at Johnson & Johnson. They compared notes on how to decide which drug studies to pause and which scientists were essential enough to continue coming in to the office. Toward the end of the call, Dr. Mammen invited Dr. Barron to join a larger group of R&D chiefs to share information about the virus and approaches to drug development, Dr. Barron says.Glaxo had a potentially critical role to play in the response to Covid-19, as one of the world's largest vaccine sellers. Sales of its shots totaled about $9.4 billion last year, the most of any of the top four vaccine-makers globally. The company also had a history of rallying its employees to respond to pandemics. In the years leading up to the 2009 swine flu pandemic, it spent $3.2 billion on R&D, acquisitions and manufacturing in preparation for a flu pandemic.On Sunday, March 8, many of the biggest drugmakers convened for a group call. Aside from Drs. Barron and Mammen, participants included the heads of research from AstraZeneca PLC, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Novartis AG, recalls Andrew Plump, president of R&D at Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., who was also on the call."Things were happening so, so quickly, with organizations closing down and quarantining, and beginning work-from-home policies," recalls Dr. Plump. "We were all scrambling. And there was also an immense amount of interest in all of us stepping up and trying to provide solutions."By the end of that call, the research bosses resolved to keep the virtual meetings going and to open up the group to other companies and, occasionally, government officials such as Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and officials from Operation Warp Speed, a $10 billion U.S. government initiative to speed the development of drugs and vaccines for Covid-19. For months, they met regularly using videoconferencing software.Concerns about running afoul of antitrust regulations were alleviated when federal regulators made it clear that research cooperation in the fight against Covid-19 was permissible. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission issued a joint statement on March 24 stating "there are many ways firms, including competitors, can engage in procompetitive collaboration that does not violate the antitrust laws."With that statement, "we felt that we had enough cover to do what we needed to do," says Dr. Plump.The group established a mandate to tackle short-term problems, such as developing reliable laboratory tests to screen the thousands of drug molecules the companies had stored in their libraries against the coronavirus. They also agreed to dramatically increase the speed at which they shared clinical trial data with one another, posting the anonymized data within one week of receiving results from their Covid-19 studies. Outside researchers are allowed to scrutinize the data to learn more about the virus.The Big PictureGlaxo began reaching partnerships on its own, too. One developed from a call Dr. Barron received in mid March from his friend George Scangos, chief executive of a small San Francisco drug-developer with a focus on infectious diseases.Dr. Scangos asked whether Glaxo would be interested in collaborating with his company, Vir Biotechnology Inc., on a Covid-19 monoclonal antibody drug that is engineered to mimic the natural antibodies the immune system makes to fight the virus."If we're going to do this, we need to go fast, because every day matters," Dr. Scangos recalls saying.Usually, such deals might take several months to a year to hammer out. Dr. Scangos and Dr. Barron set a goal of signing an agreement within three weeks.Some of the calls involved saying, "OK, if that's important to George -- done," recalls Dr. Barron. "And he would say, 'OK, if that's important to you, done. Let's move this thing along. Can't lose the big picture.'"The companies announced a deal on April 6, within 18 days of starting negotiations. Under the terms, Glaxo would purchase a $250 million stake in Vir at $37.73 a share, a 41% premium to the company's average share price over the previous three months. Clinical trials are under way and the companies expect potential authorization for the drug in the first half of 2021.One TeamGlaxo was even more aggressive in its pursuit of vaccine makers that wanted access to its adjuvant, the ingredient that boosts the immune response to a vaccine.One was Sanofi, which said in February it was developing a Covid-19 vaccine candidate. Mr. Connor called David Loew, the head of Sanofi's vaccine unit, to see if the French drugmaker would be interested in pairing its vaccine with Glaxo's adjuvant."This is an unusual call to have, but this is an unusual circumstance," Mr. Connor recalls telling Mr. Loew during the initial call, in March.Executives say the company settled on its adjuvant strategy as a way to contribute to the Covid-19 response without losing focus on its pre-pandemic mission of reinvigorating the company's product pipeline or disrupting its existing vaccine manufacturing supply chain. The company's senior management had been overhauled a few years earlier amid shareholder disillusionment over the company's mixed record in launching new blockbuster drugs. Its adjuvant was already proven to work with other vaccines, reducing its risk, and would be less of a manufacturing logistical challenge.During pandemics, adjuvants are especially valuable because they can increase the potency of vaccines, allowing companies to produce more doses from each batch it manufactures. Glaxo's adjuvant, called AS03, is a combination of vitamin E and liver oil taken from sharks. The company used it to enhance the effectiveness of its vaccine for the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.To find partners for its adjuvant, Glaxo launched an internal project led by a team of Glaxo drug hunters who looked for anyone working on a key vaccine component -- a protein known as an antigen -- that would cause a person's immune system to build up defenses against the new coronavirus. The hope was that people who got the antigen through vaccination would develop antibodies and perhaps other defenses that could protect against Covid-19.Glaxo's drug hunters mapped every antigen in the works for Covid-19 using squares on a PowerPoint slide. Every square contained the name of a potential partner, details about the vaccine and a contact person who had spoken with Glaxo. The slide resembled a digital quilt, with some 100 squares.Some in the quilt approached Glaxo seeking help. Glaxo reached out to others. The campaign was "quite unusual for us," says Mr. Connor. "Going out and offering it to the world was something quite, quite different."On that first call with Sanofi, Mr. Connor said he remembers telling Mr. Loew: "'There is an opportunity here for us to do something together, which means that we could ultimately go faster for the world and make a difference to the common enemy, which is the virus itself.'"Within 36 hours, they agreed to create a joint task force that would start exchanging information and planning how to make the partnership work while the companies worked out a formal agreement. "We knew that the world was waiting," Mr. Connor says.Initial meetings, held by videoconference among employees across multiple time zones, were "slightly awkward" as the rivals turned teammates felt each other out, said Thomas Triomphe, Sanofi's executive vice president for vaccines.The companies hope to have results from early-stage studies in late November or early December, Mr. Triomphe said. They aim to start a 30,000-person study by the end of the year and to have the vaccine approved in the first half of 2021, he says."When you're facing a public-health crisis there is no team with a blue T-shirt and a team with an orange T-shirt. Very quickly, there was only one team," Mr. Triomphe said. Neilhumphreys25 Oct '20 - 11:05 - 7080 of 7082 Edit 0 0 0 Enjoy! To Find a Coronavirus Vaccine, GlaxoSmithKline Is Bonding With Its Biggest CompetitorsSource: Dow Jones NewsBy Joseph Walker The Covid-19 pandemic is turning some fierce drug-industry foes into the best of frenemies.The pharmaceutical giant standing at the center of this team of rivals is GlaxoSmithKline PLC, the world's largest vaccine maker by sales. The British company is jointly developing a Covid-19 antibody drug with a San Francisco upstart, offering rivals a proprietary ingredient that is designed to boost a vaccine's power and planning to share research study results."We felt this very unusual situation required something that GSK hadn't done before, and something we hadn't seen in the industry before either, " says Roger Connor, president of Glaxo's vaccines business.What makes Glaxo's collaboration so unusual is that competition typically defines the relationship among drugmakers. Company researchers race to be first to bring a new kind of therapy to market or work on treatments that can outdo older medicines, while marketers roll out campaigns designed to boost sales at the expense of rivals.In the age of Covid-19, old adversaries are uniting around a common enemy: the new coronavirus. Their nascent partnership is now visible in everything from trials to research to manufacturing. Glaxo and eight other pharmaceutical firms even took the rare step of issuing a joint pledge last month to seek regulatory approvals for their vaccines only after proving their safety and effectiveness in large, final-stage clinical trials.The most common area of cooperation thus far is manufacturing. Some longtime rivals are striking deals to stretch their capacity to meet anticipated demand. Roche Holding AG is helping manufacture an antiviral drug in development by rival Regeneron. Amgen Inc. will help make Eli Lilly & Co.'s antiviral drugs if the treatments are authorized by regulators. Pfizer has dedicated manufacturing capacity to turning out doses of remdesivir, an antiviral made by rival Gilead Sciences Inc.The camaraderie also extends to the traditionally cutthroat realm of research. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. scientists contributed to research on a vaccine in development by BioNTech SE and Pfizer Inc., and were co-authors on a paper this summer detailing the results. In another rare move, Merck & Co.'s research and development chief called his Glaxo counterpartment in April to pass along a tip that one of Glaxo's molecules showed promise in Merck's Covid-19 lab tests.Glaxo's most prominent contribution to this new era of collaboration is its decision to share a proprietary vaccine component known as an adjuvant -- an ingredient that helps boost a vaccine's protective power by rousing the body's immune response. Glaxo now has agreements to supply that ingredient to four vaccine developers, including French drugmaker Sanofi SA, and stands ready to produce one billion doses of its adjuvant next year. It normally produces tens of millions annually.Some analysts say the company could enjoy benefits from selling its adjuvant for Covid-19 shots without impairing its lucrative vaccine business. "There is political capital to be gained from what they're doing, and there may be some financial returns to be had as well," says Andrew Baum, a Citigroup Inc. analyst who follows health care.Glaxo says it doesn't expect to profit from its Covid-19 vaccine collaborations during the pandemic, and it will invest any short-term profits in coronavirus research and pandemic preparedness."The adjuvant can be equally important -- maybe crucial -- to the vaccine being effective," says Hal Barron, Glaxo's chief scientific officer and president of R&D. "We thought that's where our unique opportunity to make a difference could be.The Team of RivalsThe alliance among drugmakers took hold in mid March as Glaxo closed labs amid a sharp uptick in Covid-19 infections around the world. Suddenly, Dr. Barron had to figure out how to run a global R&D organization under lockdown. He and his team debated which workers should be deemed essential and continue to work on-site, and which clinical trials should be paused and which ones to continue."I've never been in a situation like this," he says. "I wasn't sure what the right thing to do was."Dr. Barron called Mathai Mammen, a friend who heads drug research and development at Johnson & Johnson. They compared notes on how to decide which drug studies to pause and which scientists were essential enough to continue coming in to the office. Toward the end of the call, Dr. Mammen invited Dr. Barron to join a larger group of R&D chiefs to share information about the virus and approaches to drug development, Dr. Barron says.Glaxo had a potentially critical role to play in the response to Covid-19, as one of the world's largest vaccine sellers. Sales of its shots totaled about $9.4 billion last year, the most of any of the top four vaccine-makers globally. The company also had a history of rallying its employees to respond to pandemics. In the years leading up to the 2009 swine flu pandemic, it spent $3.2 billion on R&D, acquisitions and manufacturing in preparation for a flu pandemic.On Sunday, March 8, many of the biggest drugmakers convened for a group call. Aside from Drs. Barron and Mammen, participants included the heads of research from AstraZeneca PLC, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Novartis AG, recalls Andrew Plump, president of R&D at Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., who was also on the call."Things were happening so, so quickly, with organizations closing down and quarantining, and beginning work-from-home policies," recalls Dr. Plump. "We were all scrambling. And there was also an immense amount of interest in all of us stepping up and trying to provide solutions."By the end of that call, the research bosses resolved to keep the virtual meetings going and to open up the group to other companies and, occasionally, government officials such as Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and officials from Operation Warp Speed, a $10 billion U.S. government initiative to speed the development of drugs and vaccines for Covid-19. For months, they met regularly using videoconferencing software.Concerns about running afoul of antitrust regulations were alleviated when federal regulators made it clear that research cooperation in the fight against Covid-19 was permissible. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission issued a joint statement on March 24 stating "there are many ways firms, including competitors, can engage in procompetitive collaboration that does not violate the antitrust laws."With that statement, "we felt that we had enough cover to do what we needed to do," says Dr. Plump.The group established a mandate to tackle short-term problems, such as developing reliable laboratory tests to screen the thousands of drug molecules the companies had stored in their libraries against the coronavirus. They also agreed to dramatically increase the speed at which they shared clinical trial data with one another, posting the anonymized data within one week of receiving results from their Covid-19 studies. Outside researchers are allowed to scrutinize the data to learn more about the virus.The Big PictureGlaxo began reaching partnerships on its own, too. One developed from a call Dr. Barron received in mid March from his friend George Scangos, chief executive of a small San Francisco drug-developer with a focus on infectious diseases.Dr. Scangos asked whether Glaxo would be interested in collaborating with his company, Vir Biotechnology Inc., on a Covid-19 monoclonal antibody drug that is engineered to mimic the natural antibodies the immune system makes to fight the virus."If we're going to do this, we need to go fast, because every day matters," Dr. Scangos recalls saying.Usually, such deals might take several months to a year to hammer out. Dr. Scangos and Dr. Barron set a goal of signing an agreement within three weeks.Some of the calls involved saying, "OK, if that's important to George -- done," recalls Dr. Barron. "And he would say, 'OK, if that's important to you, done. Let's move this thing along. Can't lose the big picture.'"The companies announced a deal on April 6, within 18 days of starting negotiations. Under the terms, Glaxo would purchase a $250 million stake in Vir at $37.73 a share, a 41% premium to the company's average share price over the previous three months. Clinical trials are under way and the companies expect potential authorization for the drug in the first half of 2021.One TeamGlaxo was even more aggressive in its pursuit of vaccine makers that wanted access to its adjuvant, the ingredient that boosts the immune response to a vaccine.One was Sanofi, which said in February it was developing a Covid-19 vaccine candidate. Mr. Connor called David Loew, the head of Sanofi's vaccine unit, to see if the French drugmaker would be interested in pairing its vaccine with Glaxo's adjuvant."This is an unusual call to have, but this is an unusual circumstance," Mr. Connor recalls telling Mr. Loew during the initial call, in March.Executives say the company settled on its adjuvant strategy as a way to contribute to the Covid-19 response without losing focus on its pre-pandemic mission of reinvigorating the company's product pipeline or disrupting its existing vaccine manufacturing supply chain. The company's senior management had been overhauled a few years earlier amid shareholder disillusionment over the company's mixed record in launching new blockbuster drugs. Its adjuvant was already proven to work with other vaccines, reducing its risk, and would be less of a manufacturing logistical challenge.During pandemics, adjuvants are especially valuable because they can increase the potency of vaccines, allowing companies to produce more doses from each batch it manufactures. Glaxo's adjuvant, called AS03, is a combination of vitamin E and liver oil taken from sharks. The company used it to enhance the effectiveness of its vaccine for the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.To find partners for its adjuvant, Glaxo launched an internal project led by a team of Glaxo drug hunters who looked for anyone working on a key vaccine component -- a protein known as an antigen -- that would cause a person's immune system to build up defenses against the new coronavirus. The hope was that people who got the antigen through vaccination would develop antibodies and perhaps other defenses that could protect against Covid-19.Glaxo's drug hunters mapped every antigen in the works for Covid-19 using squares on a PowerPoint slide. Every square contained the name of a potential partner, details about the vaccine and a contact person who had spoken with Glaxo. The slide resembled a digital quilt, with some 100 squares.Some in the quilt approached Glaxo seeking help. Glaxo reached out to others. The campaign was "quite unusual for us," says Mr. Connor. "Going out and offering it to the world was something quite, quite different."On that first call with Sanofi, Mr. Connor said he remembers telling Mr. Loew: "'There is an opportunity here for us to do something together, which means that we could ultimately go faster for the world and make a difference to the common enemy, which is the virus itself.'"Within 36 hours, they agreed to create a joint task force that would start exchanging information and planning how to make the partnership work while the companies worked out a formal agreement. "We knew that the world was waiting," Mr. Connor says.Initial meetings, held by videoconference among employees across multiple time zones, were "slightly awkward" as the rivals turned teammates felt each other out, said Thomas Triomphe, Sanofi's executive vice president for vaccines.The companies hope to have results from early-stage studies in late November or early December, Mr. Triomphe said. They aim to start a 30,000-person study by the end of the year and to have the vaccine approved in the first half of 2021, he says."When you're facing a public-health crisis there is no team with a blue T-shirt and a team with an orange T-shirt. Very quickly, there was only one team," Mr. Triomphe said. To Find a Coronavirus Vaccine, GlaxoSmithKline Is Bonding With Its Biggest CompetitorsSource: Dow Jones NewsBy Joseph Walker The Covid-19 pandemic is turning some fierce drug-industry foes into the best of frenemies.The pharmaceutical giant standing at the center of this team of rivals is GlaxoSmithKline PLC, the world's largest vaccine maker by sales. The British company is jointly developing a Covid-19 antibody drug with a San Francisco upstart, offering rivals a proprietary ingredient that is designed to boost a vaccine's power and planning to share research study results."We felt this very unusual situation required something that GSK hadn't done before, and something we hadn't seen in the industry before either, " says Roger Connor, president of Glaxo's vaccines business.What makes Glaxo's collaboration so unusual is that competition typically defines the relationship among drugmakers. Company researchers race to be first to bring a new kind of therapy to market or work on treatments that can outdo older medicines, while marketers roll out campaigns designed to boost sales at the expense of rivals.In the age of Covid-19, old adversaries are uniting around a common enemy: the new coronavirus. Their nascent partnership is now visible in everything from trials to research to manufacturing. Glaxo and eight other pharmaceutical firms even took the rare step of issuing a joint pledge last month to seek regulatory approvals for their vaccines only after proving their safety and effectiveness in large, final-stage clinical trials.The most common area of cooperation thus far is manufacturing. Some longtime rivals are striking deals to stretch their capacity to meet anticipated demand. Roche Holding AG is helping manufacture an antiviral drug in development by rival Regeneron. Amgen Inc. will help make Eli Lilly & Co.'s antiviral drugs if the treatments are authorized by regulators. Pfizer has dedicated manufacturing capacity to turning out doses of remdesivir, an antiviral made by rival Gilead Sciences Inc.The camaraderie also extends to the traditionally cutthroat realm of research. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. scientists contributed to research on a vaccine in development by BioNTech SE and Pfizer Inc., and were co-authors on a paper this summer detailing the results. In another rare move, Merck & Co.'s research and development chief called his Glaxo counterpartment in April to pass along a tip that one of Glaxo's molecules showed promise in Merck's Covid-19 lab tests.Glaxo's most prominent contribution to this new era of collaboration is its decision to share a proprietary vaccine component known as an adjuvant -- an ingredient that helps boost a vaccine's protective power by rousing the body's immune response. Glaxo now has agreements to supply that ingredient to four vaccine developers, including French drugmaker Sanofi SA, and stands ready to produce one billion doses of its adjuvant next year. It normally produces tens of millions annually.Some analysts say the company could enjoy benefits from selling its adjuvant for Covid-19 shots without impairing its lucrative vaccine business. "There is political capital to be gained from what they're doing, and there may be some financial returns to be had as well," says Andrew Baum, a Citigroup Inc. analyst who follows health care.Glaxo says it doesn't expect to profit from its Covid-19 vaccine collaborations during the pandemic, and it will invest any short-term profits in coronavirus research and pandemic preparedness."The adjuvant can be equally important -- maybe crucial -- to the vaccine being effective," says Hal Barron, Glaxo's chief scientific officer and president of R&D. "We thought that's where our unique opportunity to make a difference could be.The Team of RivalsThe alliance among drugmakers took hold in mid March as Glaxo closed labs amid a sharp uptick in Covid-19 infections around the world. Suddenly, Dr. Barron had to figure out how to run a global R&D organization under lockdown. He and his team debated which workers should be deemed essential and continue to work on-site, and which clinical trials should be paused and which ones to continue."I've never been in a situation like this," he says. "I wasn't sure what the right thing to do was."Dr. Barron called Mathai Mammen, a friend who heads drug research and development at Johnson & Johnson. They compared notes on how to decide which drug studies to pause and which scientists were essential enough to continue coming in to the office. Toward the end of the call, Dr. Mammen invited Dr. Barron to join a larger group of R&D chiefs to share information about the virus and approaches to drug development, Dr. Barron says.Glaxo had a potentially critical role to play in the response to Covid-19, as one of the world's largest vaccine sellers. Sales of its shots totaled about $9.4 billion last year, the most of any of the top four vaccine-makers globally. The company also had a history of rallying its employees to respond to pandemics. In the years leading up to the 2009 swine flu pandemic, it spent $3.2 billion on R&D, acquisitions and manufacturing in preparation for a flu pandemic.On Sunday, March 8, many of the biggest drugmakers convened for a group call. Aside from Drs. Barron and Mammen, participants included the heads of research from AstraZeneca PLC, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Novartis AG, recalls Andrew Plump, president of R&D at Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., who was also on the call."Things were happening so, so quickly, with organizations closing down and quarantining, and beginning work-from-home policies," recalls Dr. Plump. "We were all scrambling. And there was also an immense amount of interest in all of us stepping up and trying to provide solutions."By the end of that call, the research bosses resolved to keep the virtual meetings going and to open up the group to other companies and, occasionally, government officials such as Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and officials from Operation Warp Speed, a $10 billion U.S. government initiative to speed the development of drugs and vaccines for Covid-19. For months, they met regularly using videoconferencing software.Concerns about running afoul of antitrust regulations were alleviated when federal regulators made it clear that research cooperation in the fight against Covid-19 was permissible. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission issued a joint statement on March 24 stating "there are many ways firms, including competitors, can engage in procompetitive collaboration that does not violate the antitrust laws."With that statement, "we felt that we had enough cover to do what we needed to do," says Dr. Plump.The group established a mandate to tackle short-term problems, such as developing reliable laboratory tests to screen the thousands of drug molecules the companies had stored in their libraries against the coronavirus. They also agreed to dramatically increase the speed at which they shared clinical trial data with one another, posting the anonymized data within one week of receiving results from their Covid-19 studies. Outside researchers are allowed to scrutinize the data to learn more about the virus.The Big PictureGlaxo began reaching partnerships on its own, too. One developed from a call Dr. Barron received in mid March from his friend George Scangos, chief executive of a small San Francisco drug-developer with a focus on infectious diseases.Dr. Scangos asked whether Glaxo would be interested in collaborating with his company, Vir Biotechnology Inc., on a Covid-19 monoclonal antibody drug that is engineered to mimic the natural antibodies the immune system makes to fight the virus."If we're going to do this, we need to go fast, because every day matters," Dr. Scangos recalls saying.Usually, such deals might take several months to a year to hammer out. Dr. Scangos and Dr. Barron set a goal of signing an agreement within three weeks.Some of the calls involved saying, "OK, if that's important to George -- done," recalls Dr. Barron. "And he would say, 'OK, if that's important to you, done. Let's move this thing along. Can't lose the big picture.'"The companies announced a deal on April 6, within 18 days of starting negotiations. Under the terms, Glaxo would purchase a $250 million stake in Vir at $37.73 a share, a 41% premium to the company's average share price over the previous three months. Clinical trials are under way and the companies expect potential authorization for the drug in the first half of 2021.One TeamGlaxo was even more aggressive in its pursuit of vaccine makers that wanted access to its adjuvant, the ingredient that boosts the immune response to a vaccine.One was Sanofi, which said in February it was developing a Covid-19 vaccine candidate. Mr. Connor called David Loew, the head of Sanofi's vaccine unit, to see if the French drugmaker would be interested in pairing its vaccine with Glaxo's adjuvant."This is an unusual call to have, but this is an unusual circumstance," Mr. Connor recalls telling Mr. Loew during the initial call, in March.Executives say the company settled on its adjuvant strategy as a way to contribute to the Covid-19 response without losing focus on its pre-pandemic mission of reinvigorating the company's product pipeline or disrupting its existing vaccine manufacturing supply chain. The company's senior management had been overhauled a few years earlier amid shareholder disillusionment over the company's mixed record in launching new blockbuster drugs. Its adjuvant was already proven to work with other vaccines, reducing its risk, and would be less of a manufacturing logistical challenge.During pandemics, adjuvants are especially valuable because they can increase the potency of vaccines, allowing companies to produce more doses from each batch it manufactures. Glaxo's adjuvant, called AS03, is a combination of vitamin E and liver oil taken from sharks. The company used it to enhance the effectiveness of its vaccine for the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.To find partners for its adjuvant, Glaxo launched an internal project led by a team of Glaxo drug hunters who looked for anyone working on a key vaccine component -- a protein known as an antigen -- that would cause a person's immune system to build up defenses against the new coronavirus. The hope was that people who got the antigen through vaccination would develop antibodies and perhaps other defenses that could protect against Covid-19.Glaxo's drug hunters mapped every antigen in the works for Covid-19 using squares on a PowerPoint slide. Every square contained the name of a potential partner, details about the vaccine and a contact person who had spoken with Glaxo. The slide resembled a digital quilt, with some 100 squares.Some in the quilt approached Glaxo seeking help. Glaxo reached out to others. The campaign was "quite unusual for us," says Mr. Connor. "Going out and offering it to the world was something quite, quite different."On that first call with Sanofi, Mr. Connor said he remembers telling Mr. Loew: "'There is an opportunity here for us to do something together, which means that we could ultimately go faster for the world and make a difference to the common enemy, which is the virus itself.'"Within 36 hours, they agreed to create a joint task force that would start exchanging information and planning how to make the partnership work while the companies worked out a formal agreement. "We knew that the world was waiting," Mr. Connor says.Initial meetings, held by videoconference among employees across multiple time zones, were "slightly awkward" as the rivals turned teammates felt each other out, said Thomas Triomphe, Sanofi's executive vice president for vaccines.The companies hope to have results from early-stage studies in late November or early December, Mr. Triomphe said. They aim to start a 30,000-person study by the end of the year and to have the vaccine approved in the first half of 2021, he says."When you're facing a public-health crisis there is no team with a blue T-shirt and a team with an orange T-shirt. Very quickly, there was only one team," Mr. Triomphe said. To Find a Coronavirus Vaccine, GlaxoSmithKline Is Bonding With Its Biggest CompetitorsSource: Dow Jones NewsBy Joseph Walker The Covid-19 pandemic is turning some fierce drug-industry foes into the best of frenemies.The pharmaceutical giant standing at the center of this team of rivals is GlaxoSmithKline PLC, the world's largest vaccine maker by sales. The British company is jointly developing a Covid-19 antibody drug with a San Francisco upstart, offering rivals a proprietary ingredient that is designed to boost a vaccine's power and planning to share research study results."We felt this very unusual situation required something that GSK hadn't done before, and something we hadn't seen in the industry before either, " says Roger Connor, president of Glaxo's vaccines business.What makes Glaxo's collaboration so unusual is that competition typically defines the relationship among drugmakers. Company researchers race to be first to bring a new kind of therapy to market or work on treatments that can outdo older medicines, while marketers roll out campaigns designed to boost sales at the expense of rivals.In the age of Covid-19, old adversaries are uniting around a common enemy: the new coronavirus. Their nascent partnership is now visible in everything from trials to research to manufacturing. Glaxo and eight other pharmaceutical firms even took the rare step of issuing a joint pledge last month to seek regulatory approvals for their vaccines only after proving their safety and effectiveness in large, final-stage clinical trials.The most common area of cooperation thus far is manufacturing. Some longtime rivals are striking deals to stretch their capacity to meet anticipated demand. Roche Holding AG is helping manufacture an antiviral drug in development by rival Regeneron. Amgen Inc. will help make Eli Lilly & Co.'s antiviral drugs if the treatments are authorized by regulators. Pfizer has dedicated manufacturing capacity to turning out doses of remdesivir, an antiviral made by rival Gilead Sciences Inc.The camaraderie also extends to the traditionally cutthroat realm of research. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. scientists contributed to research on a vaccine in development by BioNTech SE and Pfizer Inc., and were co-authors on a paper this summer detailing the results. In another rare move, Merck & Co.'s research and development chief called his Glaxo counterpartment in April to pass along a tip that one of Glaxo's molecules showed promise in Merck's Covid-19 lab tests.Glaxo's most prominent contribution to this new era of collaboration is its decision to share a proprietary vaccine component known as an adjuvant -- an ingredient that helps boost a vaccine's protective power by rousing the body's immune response. Glaxo now has agreements to supply that ingredient to four vaccine developers, including French drugmaker Sanofi SA, and stands ready to produce one billion doses of its adjuvant next year. It normally produces tens of millions annually.Some analysts say the company could enjoy benefits from selling its adjuvant for Covid-19 shots without impairing its lucrative vaccine business. "There is political capital to be gained from what they're doing, and there may be some financial returns to be had as well," says Andrew Baum, a Citigroup Inc. analyst who follows health care.Glaxo says it doesn't expect to profit from its Covid-19 vaccine collaborations during the pandemic, and it will invest any short-term profits in coronavirus research and pandemic preparedness."The adjuvant can be equally important -- maybe crucial -- to the vaccine being effective," says Hal Barron, Glaxo's chief scientific officer and president of R&D. "We thought that's where our unique opportunity to make a difference could be.The Team of RivalsThe alliance among drugmakers took hold in mid March as Glaxo closed labs amid a sharp uptick in Covid-19 infections around the world. Suddenly, Dr. Barron had to figure out how to run a global R&D organization under lockdown. He and his team debated which workers should be deemed essential and continue to work on-site, and which clinical trials should be paused and which ones to continue."I've never been in a situation like this," he says. "I wasn't sure what the right thing to do was."Dr. Barron called Mathai Mammen, a friend who heads drug research and development at Johnson & Johnson. They compared notes on how to decide which drug studies to pause and which scientists were essential enough to continue coming in to the office. Toward the end of the call, Dr. Mammen invited Dr. Barron to join a larger group of R&D chiefs to share information about the virus and approaches to drug development, Dr. Barron says.Glaxo had a potentially critical role to play in the response to Covid-19, as one of the world's largest vaccine sellers. Sales of its shots totaled about $9.4 billion last year, the most of any of the top four vaccine-makers globally. The company also had a history of rallying its employees to respond to pandemics. In the years leading up to the 2009 swine flu pandemic, it spent $3.2 billion on R&D, acquisitions and manufacturing in preparation for a flu pandemic.On Sunday, March 8, many of the biggest drugmakers convened for a group call. Aside from Drs. Barron and Mammen, participants included the heads of research from AstraZeneca PLC, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Novartis AG, recalls Andrew Plump, president of R&D at Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., who was also on the call."Things were happening so, so quickly, with organizations closing down and quarantining, and beginning work-from-home policies," recalls Dr. Plump. "We were all scrambling. And there was also an immense amount of interest in all of us stepping up and trying to provide solutions."By the end of that call, the research bosses resolved to keep the virtual meetings going and to open up the group to other companies and, occasionally, government officials such as Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and officials from Operation Warp Speed, a $10 billion U.S. government initiative to speed the development of drugs and vaccines for Covid-19. For months, they met regularly using videoconferencing software.Concerns about running afoul of antitrust regulations were alleviated when federal regulators made it clear that research cooperation in the fight against Covid-19 was permissible. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission issued a joint statement on March 24 stating "there are many ways firms, including competitors, can engage in procompetitive collaboration that does not violate the antitrust laws."With that statement, "we felt that we had enough cover to do what we needed to do," says Dr. Plump.The group established a mandate to tackle short-term problems, such as developing reliable laboratory tests to screen the thousands of drug molecules the companies had stored in their libraries against the coronavirus. They also agreed to dramatically increase the speed at which they shared clinical trial data with one another, posting the anonymized data within one week of receiving results from their Covid-19 studies. Outside researchers are allowed to scrutinize the data to learn more about the virus.The Big PictureGlaxo began reaching partnerships on its own, too. One developed from a call Dr. Barron received in mid March from his friend George Scangos, chief executive of a small San Francisco drug-developer with a focus on infectious diseases.Dr. Scangos asked whether Glaxo would be interested in collaborating with his company, Vir Biotechnology Inc., on a Covid-19 monoclonal antibody drug that is engineered to mimic the natural antibodies the immune system makes to fight the virus."If we're going to do this, we need to go fast, because every day matters," Dr. Scangos recalls saying.Usually, such deals might take several months to a year to hammer out. Dr. Scangos and Dr. Barron set a goal of signing an agreement within three weeks.Some of the calls involved saying, "OK, if that's important to George -- done," recalls Dr. Barron. "And he would say, 'OK, if that's important to you, done. Let's move this thing along. Can't lose the big picture.'"The companies announced a deal on April 6, within 18 days of starting negotiations. Under the terms, Glaxo would purchase a $250 million stake in Vir at $37.73 a share, a 41% premium to the company's average share price over the previous three months. Clinical trials are under way and the companies expect potential authorization for the drug in the first half of 2021.One TeamGlaxo was even more aggressive in its pursuit of vaccine makers that wanted access to its adjuvant, the ingredient that boosts the immune response to a vaccine.One was Sanofi, which said in February it was developing a Covid-19 vaccine candidate. Mr. Connor called David Loew, the head of Sanofi's vaccine unit, to see if the French drugmaker would be interested in pairing its vaccine with Glaxo's adjuvant."This is an unusual call to have, but this is an unusual circumstance," Mr. Connor recalls telling Mr. Loew during the initial call, in March.Executives say the company settled on its adjuvant strategy as a way to contribute to the Covid-19 response without losing focus on its pre-pandemic mission of reinvigorating the company's product pipeline or disrupting its existing vaccine manufacturing supply chain. The company's senior management had been overhauled a few years earlier amid shareholder disillusionment over the company's mixed record in launching new blockbuster drugs. Its adjuvant was already proven to work with other vaccines, reducing its risk, and would be less of a manufacturing logistical challenge.During pandemics, adjuvants are especially valuable because they can increase the potency of vaccines, allowing companies to produce more doses from each batch it manufactures. Glaxo's adjuvant, called AS03, is a combination of vitamin E and liver oil taken from sharks. The company used it to enhance the effectiveness of its vaccine for the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.To find partners for its adjuvant, Glaxo launched an internal project led by a team of Glaxo drug hunters who looked for anyone working on a key vaccine component -- a protein known as an antigen -- that would cause a person's immune system to build up defenses against the new coronavirus. The hope was that people who got the antigen through vaccination would develop antibodies and perhaps other defenses that could protect against Covid-19.Glaxo's drug hunters mapped every antigen in the works for Covid-19 using squares on a PowerPoint slide. Every square contained the name of a potential partner, details about the vaccine and a contact person who had spoken with Glaxo. The slide resembled a digital quilt, with some 100 squares.Some in the quilt approached Glaxo seeking help. Glaxo reached out to others. The campaign was "quite unusual for us," says Mr. Connor. "Going out and offering it to the world was something quite, quite different."On that first call with Sanofi, Mr. Connor said he remembers telling Mr. Loew: "'There is an opportunity here for us to do something together, which means that we could ultimately go faster for the world and make a difference to the common enemy, which is the virus itself.'"Within 36 hours, they agreed to create a joint task force that would start exchanging information and planning how to make the partnership work while the companies worked out a formal agreement. "We knew that the world was waiting," Mr. Connor says.Initial meetings, held by videoconference among employees across multiple time zones, were "slightly awkward" as the rivals turned teammates felt each other out, said Thomas Triomphe, Sanofi's executive vice president for vaccines.The companies hope to have results from early-stage studies in late November or early December, Mr. Triomphe said. They aim to start a 30,000-person study by the end of the year and to have the vaccine approved in the first half of 2021, he says."When you're facing a public-health crisis there is no team with a blue T-shirt and a team with an orange T-shirt. Very quickly, there was only one team," Mr. Triomphe said. To Find a Coronavirus Vaccine, GlaxoSmithKline Is Bonding With Its Biggest CompetitorsSource: Dow Jones NewsBy Joseph Walker The Covid-19 pandemic is turning some fierce drug-industry foes into the best of frenemies.The pharmaceutical giant standing at the center of this team of rivals is GlaxoSmithKline PLC, the world's largest vaccine maker by sales. The British company is jointly developing a Covid-19 antibody drug with a San Francisco upstart, offering rivals a proprietary ingredient that is designed to boost a vaccine's power and planning to share research study results."We felt this very unusual situation required something that GSK hadn't done before, and something we hadn't seen in the industry before either, " says Roger Connor, president of Glaxo's vaccines business.What makes Glaxo's collaboration so unusual is that competition typically defines the relationship among drugmakers. Company researchers race to be first to bring a new kind of therapy to market or work on treatments that can outdo older medicines, while marketers roll out campaigns designed to boost sales at the expense of rivals.In the age of Covid-19, old adversaries are uniting around a common enemy: the new coronavirus. Their nascent partnership is now visible in everything from trials to research to manufacturing. Glaxo and eight other pharmaceutical firms even took the rare step of issuing Director/PDMR Shareholding Latest Follow Feed Events Go to my Feed 23/10/2020 08:56 Breakout Marks And Spencer hit an upwards weekly price breakout. 22/10/2020 15:22 Breakout Marks And Spencer hit an upwards weekly price breakout. For readers who have followed my posts most will know I have a good handle on retailers predicting the demise of Debenhams. So what are my views? The dividend has been slashed its no longer a yield earner. At £1 there is 20% either w Read Full Thread Follow Reply
10/10/2020 10:37	onjohn: Yes Less completion I’m expecting Mks to take off next week Ocado saying 2bn sales I’ve got my fourth shop next week with Mks and is great Read Full Thread Follow Reply
07/10/2020 09:44	porsche1945: Mks terminal, unloaded at a large loss and moved into quality growth, will take the hit and get clear. It has had it, Debenhams mk2. U.K. High St is terminal, Mks hasn’t coped well with it, should have sold and lease backed estate when it was worth something, clothes and homeware hopeless and a model out of date. People say they were late to online but really I just think other companies did it better anyway. The food is good, the only beam of light really, but if they had sorted their own online food long before they would not have had to pay Ocado 750m to piggyback and its probably cannibalising a lot of store food sales too. Can see these at .50p with the only value in the company in the food, the stores are a liability like the staff and pensions. The management have been dire, like Lloyds bank, and its now showing. Stick to the S&P for investing, UK is fxxcked generally. Locked down longest, highest death rate in Europe and the worst contraction of any large economy, U.K. poorly managed too, that damages our companies and the index also. Brexit anyone, the gift that keeps on giving. Read Full Thread Follow Reply
18/9/2020 14:32	qantas: debsdowner Ocado has not helped the MKS share price and they own 50% of Ocado UK. They may buy out MKS for 2.16 billion. Read Full Thread Follow Reply
09/8/2020 10:21	xxxxxy: Ref to previous. It is better to see MKS in the round. That means the times we are in and the state of health in many of the population. Also it means the politics and regulation that we are in. Examples are Slavery issues(see Boohoo), Animal Welfare, UK Obesity, Business rates, maybe changes to tax etc etc. It may be difficult but MKS operates with all those considerations. Any one who invests without considering the whole background should not be investing. This is MKS now, not as it was for decades. Wearing blinkers and just saying MKS will not have to be concerned about those forces and other considerations is doing a disservice to themselves and others. This Now. That was Then. Like it or not. Read Full Thread Follow Reply
30/7/2020 17:56	xxxxxy: I think animal welfare is important for MKS. Background politics is now major issue for business. Be warned by the consideration of Boohoo. It is important that MKS does things to the highest standards. MKS in many ways is a signature for some of the best British shopping and other matters. We all live on the Background Tapestry and matters are not always easy to devorce. But do take your point. Read Full Thread Follow Reply
22/7/2020 03:08	buywell3: No change buywell3 - 20 May 2020 - 08:52:20 - 3759 of 5363 Marks & Sparks, chat and charts - MKS MKS still has loads of Net Debt This RNS has IMO told me that Covid-19 has been very costly to them IMO it will continue to be so Plus lease costs are hurting Can't see any reason to be positive about MKS IMO dyor Read Full Thread Follow Reply
09/7/2020 09:27	philanderer: Berenberg eyes Marks and Spencer dividends in 2022 After a ‘fireside chat’ with Marks and Spencer (MKS) chairman Archie Norman, Berenberg is expecting the retail giant to reinstate its dividend in 2022. Analyst Michelle Wilson retained her ‘buy’ recommendation and target price of 125p on the shares, which were trading at 95p yesterday. Trading is ahead of the retailer’s Covid-19 stress test plans and normal clothing market volumes are expected to return in 2021. ‘Norman is clearly excited about the management team he now has in palace to re-engineer clothing and home, while an accelerated store closure programme, supply chain efficiencies and Ocado synergies present significant opportunities across both sides of the business,’ she said. ‘While the balance sheet is weaker than the chairman might like, it is his view that M&S should be in a position to reinstate the dividend in 2022.’ HTTPS://citywire.co.uk/funds-insider/news/the-expert-view-boohoo-firstgroup-and-avast/a1377932?section=funds-insider&;_ga=2.177552613.1532138203.1594286595-960814099.1594286595#i=5 Read Full Thread Follow Reply
24/5/2020 21:54	waldron: Marks & Spencer boss bows to pressure and slashes his bonuses after ditching dividends worth £470m By Tom Witherow And Matt Oliver For The Daily Mail Published: 21:51 BST, 24 May 2020 \| Updated: 22:23 BST, 24 May 2020 The boss of Marks & Spencer has bowed to pressure and slashed his bonuses after ditching dividends worth £470m. Chief executive Steve Rowe had defied calls to give up his full £810,000 salary plus bonuses, which paid out a total of £1.6m last year. Under pressure: Chief executive Steve Rowe had defied calls to give up his full £810,000 salary plus bonuses The move is a victory for the Time To End Fat Cat Pay campaign run by the Mail, which asks business leaders to share the burden caused by Covid-19 with savers and taxpayers. Top fund managers and the Investment Association want boardrooms that ask shareholders to accept sacrifices to 'share the pain' themselves. Rowe could still receive a long-term performance-related bonus when the annual report comes out next month. On Thursday, the firm dealt its 300,000 private investors a major blow, announcing it did not intend to pay £340m in dividends this year – just weeks after last year's £130m year-end dividend was cancelled. The taxpayer is also covering £222m in costs to furlough 27,000 staff, paying 80 per cent of their wages, as well as a 12-month business rates holiday. Six FTSE100 bosses have delayed or cancelled dividends, but have yet to take a pay cut, a Mail audit reveals. BAE boss Charles Woodburn delayed a £442m dividend, but will keep a pay packet that was £3.9m in pay and bonuses last year. Mondi has not announced a pay cut for interim chief executive Andrew King since deferring the £237m dividend in April. Smiths Group boss Andy Reynolds Smith, who earned £4.1m, has also not taken a pay cut, and John Martin, of Ferguson, has kept his full package, which earned him £5.5m. Packaging company Smurfit Kappa axed a £167m dividend, according to AJ Bell, but boss Anthony Smurfit will still get almost £1m plus bonuses. The sixth firm is commodity trader Glencore. Boss Ivan Glasenberg was paid £1.2m last year, which he has retained in full. As a major shareholder, he would forego up to £190m in dividends if they are axed. Luke Hildyard, of the High Pay Centre, said: 'Surely, well-paid executives should share some of the pain with savers and investors.' Mondi and Smiths declined to comment. Smurfit Kappa and Ferguson did not respond to requests for comment. Read Full Thread Follow Reply

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