Deals, Development and Manufacturing

Merger cites combined strengths in oncology, immunology and inflammation, and cardiovascular disease.

Bio/pharma companies are successfully launching novel therapies; however, the industry still needs to work on manufacturing innovation.

Agilent and other partners are funding development of Tapestri, a single-cell sequencing platform designed to help predict cancer relapse in individual patients and show the efficacy of gene-editing experiments.

The company will use GE Healthcare’s off-the-shelf KUBio biologics factory, which is expected to start operations in 2020, to provide development and manufacturing for early- to late-clinical and early-commercial manufacturing stages.

The companies aim to advance research into inflammatory bowel disease.

The UK's government has revealed the details of the second Life Sciences sector deal, forming part of the Industrial Strategy.

The acquisition will give Genentech full rights to Jecure’s preclinical portfolio of NLRP3 inhibitors.

The investment builds on a collaboration the companies entered into in 2007 for various biomanufacturing projects.

The partnership, co-funded by Enterprise Ireland, will develop technologies for monitoring the quality of biopharma processes.

Cobra, Pall, and Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult are collaborating to develop continuous manufacturing for gene therapy production.

The University of South Australia is working to develop needle-free vaccines for Zika, chikingunya, and peanut allergy in a collaboration with Australian biotechnology company Sementis and Enesi Pharma, a United Kingdom-based pharmaceutical company.

Under the new long-term agreement, Sartorius Stedim Biotech will continue to offer Lonza media and buffer products under non-exclusive terms.

AstraZeneca is set to divest United States rights to Synagis (palivizumab) to Swedish Orphan Biovitrum (Sobi), a biopharmaceutical company focused on rare diseases, for $1.5 billion.

The companies will develop AMG 714, a novel anti-IL-15 monoclonal antibody, for the treatment of gluten-free diet non-responsive celiac disease in a collaboration worth $170 million.

Improving the manufacturing of gene therapy vectors will be crucial to making advanced treatments accessible to more patients who need them, agreed panelists at the 2018 Galien Forum.

The multi-year collaboration will incorporate NextCure's proprietary FIND-IO platform, a technology designed to identify novel cell-surface molecular interactions that drive functional immune responses in the tumor microenvironment and other disease sites.

The company has rolled out the first batch of TRACON Pharmaceutical’s lead product candidate from its Singapore-based single-use bioreactor.

Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies and the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) are collaborating to complete the technology transfer of the expression and purification of model monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) as part of AMECRYS, a research project funded by the European Commission.

This new partnership provides access to Distributed Bio’s antibody discovery platforms.

The acquisition will allow Lonza to further develop technology for scalable autologous cell-therapy manufacturing.

AbbVie will assume full development and commercial responsibility for its collaboration with Galapagos to discover and develop new therapies to treat cystic fibrosis (CF).

AstraZeneca and Innate Pharma further expand oncology collaboration with a new multi-term agreement.

The companies will work together to advance a number of Morphic's oral integrin therapeutics for fibrosis-related indications in a deal with $100 million.

The companies will work together to develop Ionis-FB-LRx for the treatment of complement-mediated diseases, including Geographic Atrophy (GA), the advanced stage of dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), in a deal worth $760 million.

Novartis plans to acquire Endocyte, a biopharmaceutical company, to accelerate the development of innovative radioligand technology for treating cancer.