Strategic Alliance Magazine Q3 2020 - 15

BUSINESS AS UNUSUAL

"In this crisis, we had to think
differently. The demand was so
great in such a short time frame, it
did drive that change of thought."
And there was a third element as well.
"I think in this crisis, we had to think differently," Mills said.
"The demand was so great in such a short time frame, it did
drive that change of thought. Do you need that for the future?
Who knows? But we know how to navigate the business and
we're even better now, in crisis, than when we started this job
in March."

"A Lot of Business Dried Up"
"Navigating the business" might describe where a lot of
people are these days, and obviously that phrase is currently
fraught with myriad concerns. That would be the case for Don
Busiek, senior vice president, strategic alliances, at software
maker PTC. Busiek is the lead on PTC's alliance with Rockwell
Automation. The partnership is only about two years old, but
already the two companies are pretty tightly linked.
Which is a good thing, because when all hell broke loose
earlier this year, the partners had to move quickly and agree
on a common strategy going forward.
"When the coronavirus hit, a lot of business dried up for a lot
of companies," Busiek said. "So we said, a) How do we help
customers deal with this scenario? And then, b) How do we
position ourselves for success so that when the virus ends, all
that pent-up demand flows to us?"
The first step in helping customers was to make one of their
best products available for free. Vuforia Chalk, an augmented
reality (AR) program that provides "expert assistance" for
remote diagnostics and servicing of manufacturing equipment, was offered by both companies to customers free of
charge until the end of August.
"It's a product that's designed for a social distancing scenario,"
Busiek explained. "A week into the pandemic hitting the US,
we came up with the idea in our CEO's exec staff on a Friday
morning. We began to execute on it and operationalize it
over the weekend. I spoke to Rockwell about it on a Monday
morning, and we had launched it by the following Friday,
jointly with Rockwell. That's pretty fast for a startup-that's
very fast for a multibillion-dollar software company (PTC)
and a $7 billion hardware and software company (Rockwell)."

exhibited strong T-cell responses to the molecule.
The US Department of Health and Human Services
paid Pfizer nearly $2 billion for 100 million doses,
should the vaccine work.
n Sanofi Pasteur and Translate Bio are building off
their previous work together developing vaccines
for infectious diseases using the latter's messenger
RNA (mRNA) platform to formulate and massproduce a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.
n Sanofi Pasteur also worked with BARDA to inject an
antigen containing the DNA sequence that matches
DNA markers found on the SARS-CoV-2 virus into
the DNA of its baculovirus expression platform, the
basis of Sanofi's licensed recombinant influenza
product. GSK later added its adjuvant technology
to the resultant S-protein COVID-19 antigen, with
the hopes that adjuvant will reduce the amount of
vaccine protein required per dose.
n Upon its acquisition of biotech Themis, Merck
inserted itself in Themis's place into a consortium
that includes Institut Pasteur and the Coalition for
Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) that aims
to develop a COVID-19 vaccine based on a measles
vector platform Themis licensed to Institut Pasteur.
n Merck is also collaborating separately with
nonprofit scientific research organization IAVI
to explore how to use its recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus (rVSV) technology to tackle
SARS-CoV-2-rVSV is the foundation for Merck's
successful ERVEBO Ebola vaccine.
n In May the US government established Operation
Warp Speed, whose ambitious goal is to develop,
test, manufacture, and distribute a safe and effective vaccine for COVID-19 and to deliver 300 million
doses by January 2021. The $10 billion publicprivate partnership involves several different
agencies of the federal government and by early
August had funded efforts by companies and partnerships including Johnson & Johnson (Janssen
Pharmaceutical), AstraZeneca-University of Oxford,
Pfizer-BioNTech, Sanofi-GSK, Moderna, Merck,
Vaxart, Inovio, and Novavax.
Antibody Therapies
Effective antibody treatments could serve as a bridge
until a vaccine is globally accessible by providing shortterm prevention and relief of COVID-19 symptoms.
n Eli Lilly and Company started the first two clinical
trials of COVID-19 antibody candidates in June.
The first centered around its LY-CoV555 COVID-19

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Strategic Alliance Magazine Q3 2020

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