July 9, 2020 - Fierce Biotech
A who’s who of Big Pharma companies, including
Pfizer
, Johnson & Johnson and Merck, has banded together to bolster the development of new antibiotics. The companies announced Thursday the $1 billion AMR Action Fund, which aims to see two to four new antibiotics through approval by 2030.
Through the fund, named for antimicrobial resistance, the pharma companies will work with charities, development banks and other organizations to ramp up antibiotics development. And they won’t just contribute cash—they’ll also offer their technical know-how to help young biotechs advance new antibiotics.
“With the AMR Action Fund, the pharmaceutical industry is investing nearly $1 billion to sustain an antibiotic pipeline that is on the verge of collapse, a potentially devastating situation that could affect millions of people around the world,” said David Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly and president of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations, which helped organize the fund.
July 8, 2020 - Fierce Pharma
As COVID-19 vaccines move into late-stage testing, governments and drugmakers are scrambling to secure packaging to store those shots. One Alabama-based materials manufacturer hopes to ease that strain with the help of some Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) funding.
Drug packaging specialist SiO2 Materials Science plans to shell out $
163 million
to expand and upgrade its packaging plant in Auburn, Alabama. The scale-up will boost production capacity for vials and syringes to house COVID-19 vaccines and treatments while allowing the company to continue supplying its current pharma customers.
The expansion plans follow SiO2's $143 million
contract
with BARDA and the DOD's Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Defense to scale up production.
July 7, 2020 - Fierce Pharma
When Novartis shelled out $3.9 billion for France-based Advanced Accelerator Applications in 2017, it had blockbuster hopes for AAA’s Lutathera, a radiotherapy to treat neuroendocrine tumors (NETs).
Those expectations were not misplaced. In fact, demand for Lutathera is so high that AAA is planning to build a new 50,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Indianapolis’ Purdue Research Park to make the drug and other radiotherapies, the Novartis unit said Tuesday.
The Indianapolis factory will open in 2023, said AAA, which did not release financial terms or hiring plans. It’s the subsidiary’s second U.S. manufacturing plant.
July 7, 2020 - Fierce Pharma
Among the drugmakers seeking an answer for COVID-19, Regeneron once showed promise in its quest to repurpose an older therapy as a treatment and develop a novel antibody cocktail, too. Now, thanks to disappointing data, that first path appears blocked. But the second is looking up, to the tune of $450 million.
Regeneron and the Trump administration
signed
a $450 million pact for U.S. supply of the drugmaker's investigational antibody cocktail for COVID-19, which entered a late-stage human trial as a preventive earlier this week and is rolling ahead in two phase 2 treatment trials.
As part of the agreement, Regeneron will amp up manufacturing to produce up to 1.6 million doses of the cocktail, dubbed REGN-COV2, as early as the end of summer, the company said.
July 7, 2020 - Fierce Pharma
Johnson & Johnson, like all drugmakers in the COVID-19 vaccine race, is hoping to cobble together enough manufacturing capacity to rapidly scale production of its shot hopeful. Now, to the tune of nearly half a billion dollars, J&J is ready to put its money where its mouth is.
J&J and Maryland-based CDMO Emergent BioSolutions
inked
a five-year work order worth at least $480 million to help produce the New Jersey-based drugmaker's COVID-19 vaccine candidate, Emergent said in a release.