Anti-bug big house

With a war chest of over $500 million and a suite of partnerships, Vir Biotechnology Inc. is taking a build it and buy it approach, amassing diverse platforms to deploy against a wide spectrum of infectious diseases. The bet is that technology combinations will be key for battling bugs, and gathering everything it needs under one roof will give Vir the tools to mix and match modalities freely.

“There’s a reason why we raised that much money,” CEO George Scangos told BioCentury. “The answer is so we can take a multimodal approach, so we can aggregate compounds and technologies, so we can put together programs that we think have the highest likelihood of success.”...