Bob Bradway, Amgen CEO (Scott Eisen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Amgen announced back in June that it would spend $365 million to build its manufacturing plant of the future in New Albany, OH, complete with self-driving vehicles and data-gathering tools to ensure efficiency. Today, that journey begins.
The California-based biotech will break ground today on its new assembly and packaging plant, which is estimated to create 400 new jobs in the area just 18 miles northeast of Columbus, according to a report by the Columbus Dispatch. The new facility will further Amgen’s capabilities to make medicines set for distribution in the US, it said in a statement a few months ago.
‘This is a mission critical site for us,’ CEO Bob Bradway, a Columbus native, told the Dispatch. ‘This provides the increased capacity we need and enables us to mitigate risk from single-source packaging.’
Amgen received several tax breaks to set roots in the up-and-coming New Albany International Business Park, including a 100% property tax abatement for 15 years. The 270,000 square-foot site won’t be open until 2024, the Dispatch reported. But the goal is to have ‘the most advanced assembly and packing operation,’ VP of site operations Sandra Rodriguez-Toledo told Endpoints News several months ago. There’s a heavy emphasis on automation. And yes: That means self-driving vehicles to move materials from one facility to another.
The site will also feature smart sensors to evaluate products, and data-gathering tools to predict quantity and ensure efficiency, Amgen said back in June. Its construction will be consistent with Amgen’s goal to reach carbon neutrality by 2027.
Rodriguez-Toledo is moving all the way from Puerto Rico to oversee the new Ohio facility. She told the Dispatch that hiring has already begun. With an expected payroll of around $40 million, Amgen is offering a pretty penny to hire new technicians, engineers, and quality assurance, quality control, administrative and management specialists.
The facility will also support the OneTen initiative, which Amgen is a part of along with companies such as AT&T, Lowe’s and Gilead, to hire a million Black Americans into well-paying jobs by 2031.
Ohio State University president Kristina Johnson said in June that Amgen has agreed to create an internship program with the university, and offer other experiential learning opportunities.
‘We are excited to welcome Amgen to New Albany,’ city mayor Sloan Spalding said at the time. ‘They are a tremendous fit, from their company values to the quality of their products, and we are glad they saw the benefit of New Albany’s robust infrastructure and speed to market capabilities.’
The COVID-19 pandemic has made society very aware of the need to be flexible in the approach to daily life. Every part of ‘normal’ day-to-day life has been disrupted. Clinical trials and the traditional way of conducting them has been no different. Flexibility became an immediate need for sponsors, CROs, clinical sites, and patients. Quick adjustments had to be made, along with finding new ways to make sure that patients had the appropriate care, oversight of the clinical sites continued to be managed, and drug supply and accountability were maintained. Many clinical sites found themselves acting as a shipping department, trying to make sure all of their patients received their drug safely and on time. CRAs performed remote oversight visits, virtual site tours, and virtual accountability audits. Sponsors quickly began to rethink their Direct-to-Patient (DTP) approach as patients increasingly requested that their study drugs be shipped to their homes.
After a fiasco surrounding the contamination of Covid-19 vaccine doses in its facilties — during a time in which vaccinating residents was dire to America’s return to normalcy — Emergent BioSolutions’ $600 million manufacturing deal with the US government has come to an end.
CEO Bob Kramer said that the two parties ‘mutually agreed’ to terminate the contract in an earnings call with investors Thursday, evaporating about $180 million in deal value.
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For the past 20 years, Novartis and Roche were more than cross-town rivals reigning over towering pharmaceutical dynasties. Novartis also holds a sizable chunk of Roche’s shares — amounting to a nearly one-third voting stake.
Now, Roche is buying that stake back for $20.7 billion.
‘After more than 20 years as a shareholder of Roche, we concluded that now is the right time to monetize our investment,’ Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan said in a statement, adding that the cash will go toward purposes in line with current capital allocation.
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Site of bluebird’s new headquarters at 455 Grand Union Blvd, Assembly Row (Photo credit to Aram Boghosian)
Recouping from a series of setbacks for its gene therapy business, bluebird bio successfully bisected itself earlier this week as part of a big rebrand around genetic disease. Now, with its future still in the wind, bluebird has found a new nest.
Bluebird has signed a lease for a new 61,000-square-foot headquarters at Assembly Row in Somerville, MA, that the newly stripped-down biotech envisions as its hybrid home base of the future after spinning off its oncology business earlier this week.
The US government’s $1.8 billion investment into Novavax’s Covid-19 vaccine may soon pay off as the company floated some positive comments around the issues surrounding the manufacturing of its recombinant protein vaccine, which could be added early next year to the world’s arsenal of shots.
The company has struggled with its vaccine candidate’s potency and purity, pushing back the timing of submitting its application to the FDA all summer, and in June the US government had to steer Novavax, instructing the company to prioritize alignment with the FDA on its analytic methods before conducting additional US manufacturing, and ‘further indicated that the US government will not fund additional US manufacturing until such agreement has been made,’ the company said.
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis
Last summer marked a major breakthrough in drug discovery when DeepMind, a predictive modeling startup from Google parent company Alphabet, offered the most accurate picture yet of the ‘protein folding’ problem. The Alphabet team is now propping up a unit focused solely on drug discovery, and it will look to leverage lessons learned from DeepMind’s example.
Alphabet has launched Isomorphic Labs, a London-based drug discovery startup leveraging the company’s AI and machine learning work, and lessons from DeepMind’s AlphaFold breakthroughs, CEO Demis Hassabis said in a blog post Thursday.
Albert Bourla, Pfizer CEO (John Thys, Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
Pfizer on Friday unveiled statistically significant efficacy data for its potential Covid-19 pill among people who haven’t been hospitalized with the virus. The data will likely lead to a quick EUA from the FDA and add to a growing field of effective, easy-to-use treatments.
Data from a scheduled interim analysis showed an 89% reduction in risk of Covid-related hospitalization or death from any cause compared to placebo in patients treated within three days of symptom onset. Pfizer said it halted enrollment in the trial because of the positive results, and in consultation with the FDA.
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Catalent CEO John Chiminski (Jeff Rumans)
Just weeks after Catalent opened a newly acquired site in Shiga, Japan, the CDMO giant announced the opening of a new facility in San Diego to up its clinical packaging and distribution solutions on the West Coast.
The facility is 24,000 square feet and located within a mile of the company’s early-phase oral drug product center of excellence. It supports clinical studies for Phases I through III, and end-to-end services.
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WuXi Biologics CEO Chris Chen (Photographer: Anthony Kwan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
WuXi Biologics’ latest project is open for business in the Chinese firm’s namesake city.
WuXi has pumped millions into the expansion of its manufacturing operations as of late, and on Sunday announced it successfully launched its new drug product facility in Wuxi. That marks the eighth drug production facility for WuXi Biologics.
The site will add another 60 million vials a year to WuXi’s commercial drug production operations and consolidate the company’s single-use and automation operations.
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https://endpts.com/amgen-breaks-ground-on-new-albany-oh-manufacturing-plant-of-the-future-report/
