Friday, October 4, 2019 Daily Archives

‘Unprecedented’ HPV vaccine demand to fuel more Merck capacity investments

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Having recently invested over $1.6 billion in its network, Merck says it is committed to further expand the supply of its HPV vaccines as worldwide demand continues to spiral. Speaking at the at Morgan Stanley 17th Annual Global Healthcare Conference last month, Roger Perlmutter, EVP and president of Merck Research Laboratories, said human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines Gardasil and Gardasil 9 were the products that have the dominant near-term commercial potential for his firm. But a lack of manufacturing capacity at…

October 4, 2019

Cellectis selects Lonza for off-the-shelf CAR-T manufacture

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CDMO Lonza will make clinical batches of an allogeneic CAR-T cell candidate from its facility in the Netherlands for French firm Cellectis. Cellectis has a range of ‘UCART’ off-the-shelf chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies in development for hematological malignancies, based on its TALEN gene-editing technology. To support this, the French biopharma has selected Swiss contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) Lonza to supply clinical materials from its facility in Geleen, added to its cell and gene therapy network through…

October 4, 2019

Biopharma continues to flex its Abs, survey shows

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Results of KNect365’s Antibodies Emerging Tech Survey shows biopharma remains focused on monoclonal antibodies but acknowledges challenges persist, particularly in the discovery stage. There were over 200 respondents to the survey, with 81% of the organizations focusing on developing monoclonal antibody (MAb) therapeutics. This comes as no surprise, as the first Mab entered the market over 30 years ago in the form of Janssen-Cilag’s Orthoclone OKT3 (muromonab) and the modality has been deemed well-characterized by the US Food and Drug…

October 4, 2019