Catalent has dedicated a high-speed vial filling line to Moderna at its site in Indiana, which it says will free up space for its non-COVID related customers.  The high-speed vial filling line expands upon an agreement inked between the two firms last June, and provides Moderna with a dedicated fill-finish service through to June 2023. It will initially be used to manufacture Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, approved by the US FDA under an emergency use authorization (EUA) last December, though there is potential for it to produce other clinical products in the firm’s pipeline. According to the…

Sanofi says the facility in Toronto, Canada will provide antigen and filling capacity for its high-dose quadrivalent influenza vaccine Fluzone. Sanofi’s high-dose (HD) quadrivalent flu vaccine Fluzone is the latest variant of the French biopharma long-standing Fluzone franchise, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in people aged 65 and older in November, replacing the HD trivalent product. The vaccine is currently manufactured exclusively by Sanofi Pasteur, Sanofi’s vaccines global business unit, at its Swiftwater, Pennsylvania site but…

Novartis will close its Longmont, Colorado biomanufacturing after over anticipating the amount of capacity needed to produce Zolgensma and other gene therapies. When Novartis acquired AveXis in May 2018, it quickly began expanding its manufacturing network to support the then lead candidate Zolgensma (onasemnogene abeparvovec-xioi1). By the time the gene therapy won US approval as a treatment for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) in May the following year, Novartis was confident it had built up a sufficient production footprint for launch…

Boehringer Ingelheim invested in capacity at sites in Germany and Austria last year on the back of high capacity utilization and increased demand for CDMO services. While most of Boehringer Ingelheim’s revenues come from its own portfolio of human and animal therapeutics, Boehringer Ingelheim’s biopharma contract manufacturing business pulled in €837 million ($986 million) in 2020, up 6.6% on the year prior. According to the firm’s annual report, “Boehringer Ingelheim covers the entire biopharmaceutical value chain, from development of the…

Biosimilar maker and CDMO mAbxience will install an ABEC 4,000 L CSR bioreactor at its site in León, Spain. mAbxience, the biologics division of Spain’s Insud Pharma group, claims its León plant is “the biggest biologic plant in Spain and the first in Europe with fully integrated single-use technology in most processes.” Now the site is set to get bigger, with a 4,000 L single-use bioreactor (SUB) system expected to be installed in the coming months, which, according to the…

Infrastructure, state incentives, and proximity to an existing facility have driven CDMO Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies to select Holly Springs, North Carolina as the site of its ¥200 billion biologics plant. In January, Fujifilm Corporation announced plans to invest ¥200 billion (then $2 billion, now $1.8 billion) to build a biologics facility in the US run by its contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) business Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies (FDB). Details, including the planned mammalian cell culture capacity of 160,000 L (made…