Deal-Making

Allogene turns to MaxCyte’s tech for its off-the-shelf CAR-T therapies

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MaxCyte says its clinically validated electroporation technology will help increase efficiency and improve yield of Allogene’s allogeneic CAR-T therapy candidates. Pfizer-backed biotech Allogene launched in 2018 with a focus on developing allogeneic, or off-the-shelf, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies. To achieve this, the firm has regularly stressed the importance of manufacturing, devoting “considerable time and resources†to the process. Now the firm has inked a deal to use MaxCyte’s ExPERT platform to develop and advance its candidates through to…

April 3, 2020

J&J to expand vaccine capacity as part of $1bn BARDA coronavirus collaboration

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Johnson & Johnson (J&J) says it will leverage and expand facilities in The Netherlands and Pennsylvania in efforts to reach one billion doses of a potential COVID-19 vaccine. In February, J&J teamed up with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to develop a vaccine against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). At the time the company said it would work to upscale production and manufacturing capacities, leveraging its AdVac and PER.C6…

April 1, 2020

Cytiva rises out of GE Healthcare as Danaher completes $21bn deal

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It’s “absolutely business as usual†says Cytiva, the bioprocess vendor formerly known as GE Healthcare Life Sciences, despite a new owner and an ongoing coronavirus pandemic.   Three months later than originally planned, Danaher Corporation has completed the largest ever acquisition in the bioprocess space, adding the biopharma business unit of GE Healthcare to its life sciences portfolio. The $21.4 billion (€19.4 billion) deal brings Danaher a range of products including the AKTA, Hyclone, MabSelect, Wave, and Xcellerex brands, along…

April 1, 2020

Translate Bio, Sanofi secure CDMO capacity for potential COVID-19 mRNA vaccine

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Sanofi has become the latest firm to leverage mRNA vaccine technology to tackle COVID-19. Its partner Translate Bio, meanwhile, has secured dedicated manufacturing capacity at AMRI to respond to the potential global demand. France’s Sanofi Pasteur announced it is extending an alliance formed in 2018 with Translate Bio specifically to target the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Translate is already producing multiple mRNA constructs through its MRT platform, and now the platform will be used to discover, design and manufacture a number…

March 31, 2020

Wuxi Biologics signs R&D license for fungal expression tech

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Wuxi Biologics is testing a gene expression system that Dyadic International claims is faster and more efficient than competing systems. Dyadic shared details of the non-exclusive research license on March 30, explaining the Chinese contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) will evaluate the C1 technology and cell lines in a cGMP environment. The deal was confirmed by Wuxi Biologics spokesman Kevin Huang, who told us “This is to initiate a test of their C1 strain for microbial protein expression.†He…

March 31, 2020

Later in-licensing deals impacting biopharma CDMOs, says expert

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Biopharma firms are in-licensing candidates later according to an industry expert, who says the trend is impacting the CDMO sector. In-licensing – the practice of paying for rights to develop and commercialize a product discovered by another company – is a widely used strategy in the biopharmaceutical industry. According to a recent report in Nature the top 10 drug licensing deals in the first three quarters of 2019 were worth $34 billion (€31 billion), an increase of 10% from the…

March 27, 2020

Danaher closes in on $21bn GE takeover after FTC approval

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Danaher says the GE Biopharma takeover will complete this month after US competition authorities grant conditional approval for the $21.4 billion deal. The condition imposed by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is that Danaher sells some bioprocessing technologies and products. The Commission announced its decision on March 20, explaining the original deal would have unfairly reduced competition. The divested techs will include microcarrier beads, various chromatography columns and skids, single use tangential flow filtration systems, label-fee molecular characterization instruments…

March 23, 2020

Juno hires Oxford Biomedica for vectors, platform and OxBox

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Juno Therapeutics has licensed Oxford Biomedica’s gene delivery platform in a deal that will also see the latter make vectors for clinical trials. Juno will use the technology – known as the Lentivector platform – in both its CAR-T and TCR-T development programmes. The US biotech has agreed to pay $10 million upfront as well as $86 million based on the achievement of certain developmental and regulatory milestones. Oxford Biomedica will also receive sales royalties of up to $131 million…

March 18, 2020

One billion doses: CureVac gains $88m to support capacity for COVID-19 mRNA vaccine

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CureVac – the German biotech at the center of a Donald Trump acquisition rumor – has received a grant from the European Commission to expedite construction of a plant set to make a potential mRNA vaccine against coronavirus. The European Commission (EC) offered up to €80 million ($88 million) of financial support to German firm CureVac this week in its efforts to support the development and manufacture of a potential vaccine to treat the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). At the time…

March 18, 2020

MilliporeSigma: Thermo Fisher’s Qiagen buy ‘no threat’ to bioprocess landscape

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Merck KGaA says bioprocess M&A is significantly different than in the pharma world and sees no challenge to its MilliporeSigma division from Thermo Fisher’s recent acquisitions. Last week, bioprocess vendor Thermo Fisher agreed to buy Qiagen for $11.5 billion (€10.1 billion). The deal will bolster Thermo Fisher’s diagnostics business and add sample preparation, assay development and bioinformatics capabilities to its genetic analysis and biosciences capabilities. It is also the latest billion-dollar plus deal for Thermo Fisher, which has in recent…

March 10, 2020