Novartis revealed the healthcare and pharma industry has emerged as a desired career destination for tech talent during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the Powerful Pairing research report launched today.

The research - which covered 2,502 tech professionals in the US, UK, Germany, China and India, conducted between May and June 2020 - targeted respondents from a variety of sectors and organizations with the objective to study perception shifts of the industry in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines global business unit of Sanofi, and Translate Bio (NASDAQ: TBIO), a clinical-stage messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics company, have agreed to expand their existing 2018 collaboration and license agreement to develop mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases.

Novartis has made the decision to stop and discontinue its sponsored HCQ clinical trial for COVID-19 due to acute enrollment challenges that have made trial completion infeasible. The recruitment challenge facing our HCQ trial has made it unlikely that the clinical team will be able to collect meaningful data in a reasonable timeframe to determine the effectiveness of HCQ in treating patients with COVID-19.

Today Bayer announced the support of "The Challenge Initiative" ("TCI" hereafter) with a payment of 10 million USD. Hosted at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the initiative provides women and girls living in urban poverty in cities in Africa and Asia with family planning and reproductive health solutions.

Sanofi detailed plans on how the Company will make significant investments in France to increase its vaccines research and production capacities, and contribute in responding to future pandemic risks. Aligned with its corporate strategy presented last December, Sanofi will invest €610 million to create a new production site and research center in France with both dedicated to vaccines.

AstraZeneca has reached an agreement with Europe's Inclusive Vaccines Alliance (IVA), spearheaded by Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands, to supply up to 400 million doses of the University of Oxford's COVID-19 vaccine, with deliveries starting by the end of 2020.

Gilead Sciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: GILD) announced topline results from the Phase 3 SIMPLE trial in hospitalized patients with moderate COVID-19 pneumonia. This open-label study evaluated 5-day and 10-day courses of the investigational antiviral remdesivir plus standard of care, versus standard of care alone.