Thursday, February 25, 2021 Daily Archives

New Data: A Better Way to Run CHO Cell Culture Experiments

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This webcast features: Deborah Pascoe, PhD, Vice President of Operations, Culture Biosciences The bench-scale bioreactor has been the workhorse of Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell culture process development for decades. However, running benchtop bioreactors requires significant resources, infrastructure, and staffing. Tubing assembly, sterilization, calibration, and other setup activities can take hours to days. Tear down, cleaning, and deactivation are similarly burdensome. There are potentially large associated costs to prepare or purchase media, carry seed trains, and maintain facilities. Most critically,…

February 25, 2021

Merck buying Pandion Therapeutics in $1.85bn deal

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Merck & Co. will add a pipeline of precision immune modulators and a drug design and discovery platform through the proposed acquisition of Pandion. The deal, announced today, will see Merck & Co. pay $60 per share in cash for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm, totalling roughly $1.85 billion. Pandion is developing therapies for the tissue-specific treatment of patients with autoimmune and inflammatory diseases and organ transplants. Its lead candidate, bispecific antibody PT101, is in early-phase clinical trial for ulcerative colitis…

February 25, 2021

Repligen eyes more M&A and expansions as demand continues to rocket

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Repligen says it will both reinvest in its manufacturing network and look for M&A opportunities to feed the high demand for bioprocess consumables. For the full year 2020, bioprocessing tech firm Repligen Corporation reported sales of $366 million, up 36% year-on-year. The fourth quarter itself pulled in $108 million, representing a 56% increase on the same period 2019. As with fellow bioprocess vendors (Danaher, Sartorius, Thermo Fisher etc), COVID-19 played a major part in Repligen’s 2020 top line, with its…

February 25, 2021

BMS ups Breyanzi production with Massachusetts cell therapy plant

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Bristol Myers-Squibb (BMS) will open a 244,000 square-foot cell therapy facility in Devens, Massachusetts expanding its global manufacturing network. The site will initially manufacture BMS’ first CAR T cell therapy, Breyanzi (lisocabtagene maraleucel; liso-cel). The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the therapy this month to treat patients with relapsed or refractory large B-cell lymphoma. The new facility at the company’s 89-acre Devens campus will be completed in 2021 with commercial manufacturing set to begin by 2023. Previously, BMS…

February 25, 2021