Zoster vaccine recombinant, adjuvanted(GlaxoSmithKline Plc)

China’s announcement of 34% tariffs on all US imports — a retaliation against US tariffs that were announced this week — could create more challenges for drugmakers already navigating a dampened Chinese market and increased competition there. China’s Ministry of Finance said Friday that the country will put a 34% levy “on all imported goods originating from the US.” The tariff starts April 10, a day after President Donald Trump’s similar tariffs are supposed to go into effect. No tariff exemptions have yet to be announced by China, and it is unknown if these will be revealed at a later date. Large drugmakers typically have a global footprint, and do much of their manufacturing outside the US, which could limit the impact of new Chinese tariffs. But the industry has already been struggling with weakened demand in China, in particular for vaccines. Earlier this year, New Jersey-based Merck said that because of “ uncertain timing of an economic recovery in China ,” it had to pause shipments of its HPV vaccine Gardasil. Citing low demand, the company said that Gardasil sales dipped 17% in the fourth quarter of 2024. Meanwhile, GSK’s vaccine sales declined in 2024. CEO Emma Walmsley attributed this to a “challenging China macroenvironment,” she said during the company’s earnings call in early February. In particular, sales of GSK’s RSV vaccine Arexvy dropped by 51%, and its Shingrix vaccines only had a 1% increase compared to 2023. Meanwhile, Merck KGaA similarly said it was “fine-tuning” its strategy in China after facing a muted market in the country, a priority for the company since 33% of its sales came from the Asia-Pacific market in the first half of 2024. Some drugmakers may be able to sidestep any impact through their global manufacturing supply chains. For instance, Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly has made an effort to locate some of its GLP-1 manufacturing in Europe, especially in Ireland . Lilly has also been expanding its domestic footprint in China with a $200 million investment in its Suzhou factory last October. Chinese drugmakers have also been racing to catch up with its US companies by making advanced therapies domestically, a move to make the country less reliant on US pharmaceutical imports. The number of drugs in China’s pipeline is continuing to rise, while the number of US clinical-stage assets has been slowly decreasing from 2022. Last year, China had 6,280 drugs in development, a 1,200% increase from a decade earlier, according to data from Pharmaprojects and Citeline. The US-China biopharma relationship has been fairly turbulent over the past year. The US weighed the passage of legislation called the Biosecure Act , which was aiming to block US companies from working with Chinese suppliers. The result of this meant Chinese service suppliers saw a dip in US revenue growth , with customers choosing to place their business elsewhere.

TUESDAY, April 2, 2025 -- The shingles vaccine can do more than protect seniors from painful, blistering rashes. It also appears to protect older folks from dementia , researchers say. Seniors who got the shingles vaccine when it became available in the U.K. were 20% less likely to develop dementia than those who did not take the jab, according to research published April 2 in the journal Nature . “It was a really striking finding,” senior researcher Dr. Pascal Geldsetzer , an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University, said in a news release. “This huge protective signal was there, any which way you looked at the data.” These findings came about due to a “natural experiment” that resulted from the way the shingles vaccine was handed out in Wales after it became available in 2013, Geldsetzer said. Shingles is caused by the same virus that causes chicken pox, varicella-zoster . The virus stays dormant in the nerve cells of people who get chicken pox as children, and then re-emerges as folks’ immune systems weaken due to old age or illness. The vaccine works by boosting seniors’ immune response against varicella-zoster, preventing the dormant virus from emerging and causing shingles. However, researchers wondered if the shingles vaccine might protect the brain as well. Recent evidence has indicated that certain viral infections might increase a person’s risk of dementia . To test this theory, researchers looked to Wales. There, on Sept. 1, 2013, public health officials began offering the vaccine to anyone 79 years of age. People could only get the vaccine once they’d turned 79, and only for that year. Once folks turned 80, they were out of luck, including anyone who’d already turned 80 by the start of the vaccine program. The rules were designed to ration a limited supply of vaccine, but they also created a natural randomized trial that could test the vaccine’s effects on people, researchers said. By comparing people who turned 80 just before September 2013 with those who turned 80 just after, researchers could isolate the vaccine’s effects. “We know that if you take a thousand people at random born in one week and a thousand people at random born a week later, there shouldn’t be anything different about them on average. They are similar to each other apart from this tiny difference in age,” Geldsetzer said. “What makes the study so powerful is that it’s essentially like a randomized trial with a control group — those a little bit too old to be eligible for the vaccine — and an intervention group — those just young enough to be eligible,” he added. Researchers tracked health outcomes over the next seven years for people who got the vaccine versus those who didn’t. As expected, shingles cases were 37% lower in people who’d received the vaccine, researchers found. But by 2020, vaccine recipients also were 20% less likely to develop dementia, results show. This finding held even after researchers considered other potential factors that might influence dementia risk like level of education or chronic illnesses such as diabetes , heart disease or cancer. “The signal in our data was so strong, so clear and so persistent,” Geldsetzer said. Results also showed that the protection against dementia was much more pronounced in women than in men. This could be because women on average respond better to vaccination than men, researchers said. Also, shingles is more common in women than in men, so the vaccine’s protection might matter more for them. This research team has since replicated the Wales findings using health records from England, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. “We just keep seeing this strong protective signal for dementia in dataset after dataset,” Geldsetzer said. It’s not clear, however, why the vaccine would protect against dementia at all, researchers said. It might protect the brain by boosting the immune system overall, or by specifically preventing varicella-zoster from having some yet-unknown affect on brain health, researchers speculated. It’s also not known whether the newest version of the vaccine, which is the only one available in the U.S., would confer the same protection, researchers noted. The first vaccine, Zostavax , contained a live but weakened version of the varicella-zoster virus to which the immune system responded. It’s now been replaced by Shingrix, a genetically engineered version of the vaccine that contains only certain proteins from the virus. Shingrix is more effective against varicella-zoster – 97% versus 51% in clinical trials – but might have a different impact on dementia risk than its predecessor, researchers said. Geldsetzer hopes these new findings will inspire others to look into Shingrix’s effectiveness against dementia. “At least investing a subset of our resources into investigating these pathways could lead to breakthroughs in terms of treatment and prevention,” he concluded. Whatever your topic of interest, subscribe to our newsletters to get the best of Drugs.com in your inbox.