Fresh off corporate split, bluebird bio plots new hybrid headquarters at Somerville’s Assembly Row

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 drug­mak­er, now fo­cused sole­ly on gene ther­a­pies for se­vere ge­net­ic dis­ease, plans to move as many as 425 em­ploy­ees to the new site by Spring 2022.

In a sign of the times, blue­bird is build­ing its new roost around a hy­brid work mod­el, lever­ag­ing lessons learned dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. The move, in to­tal, is ex­pect­ed to save blue­bird about $120 mil­lion over the course of the next six years.

Here’s what CBO Ja­son Cole had to say about the de­ci­sion:

Over the past 18 months, we have trans­formed the way we work and live as we’ve nav­i­gat­ed through the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and re-es­tab­lished our­selves as a com­pa­ny fo­cused on pur­su­ing cu­ra­tive gene ther­a­pies for se­vere ge­net­ic dis­ease. Sav­ings from our re­al es­tate foot­print sup­port our fo­cus on in­creased fis­cal dis­ci­pline and in­vest­ment in our core pro­grams and pipeline. We are ex­cit­ed to mi­grate to our new nest at As­sem­bly Row and to work with Fed­er­al to de­sign a space that al­lows us to work smarter and meet the chang­ing needs of our busi­ness and ex­pec­ta­tions of our birds – now and in the fu­ture.

Mean­while, blue­bird will main­tain its ex­ist­ing lab space in Cam­bridge — like­ly at a king’s ran­som, giv­en the de­mand — through 2023. The As­sem­bly Row site is part of a sprawl­ing com­mer­cial-res­i­den­tial su­per­com­plex that will even­tu­al­ly span 40 acres along the Mys­tic Riv­er and I-93 with tram ac­cess to Down­town Boston. For blue­bird, the new digs will play home to the com­pa­ny’s move in­to the fu­ture with a gene ther­a­py busi­ness that has in many ways dis­ap­point­ed de­spite be­ing one of the ear­li­est — and most loud­ly her­ald­ed — en­trants in­to the field. Nick Leschly, the for­mer CEO at the com­bined blue­bird, will now run on­col­o­gy spin­off 2sev­en­ty­bio, which hand­picked much of the old com­pa­ny’s brain trust to help kick­start the new brand.

The split came af­ter a se­ries of de­lays and set­backs for one of the most promi­nent biotechs of the last decade. Al­though blue­bird saw Bris­tol My­ers Squibb take the biotech’s CAR-T for mul­ti­ple myelo­ma to ap­proval this year, the com­pa­ny has faced re­peat­ed man­u­fac­tur­ing de­lays for its gene ther­a­pies for sick­le cell dis­ease and be­ta-tha­lassemia, de­spite da­ta sug­gest­ing the treat­ments could be near-cu­ra­tive.

The com­pa­ny has had greater suc­cess in Eu­rope, where reg­u­la­tors ap­proved the gene ther­a­py for be­ta-tha­lassemia and cere­bral adrenoleukody­s­tro­phy, an oth­er­wise fa­tal brain dis­ease. But the com­pa­ny de­cid­ed this year that its ther­a­pies were not worth mar­ket­ing at the rates Eu­ro­pean gov­ern­ments were will­ing to pay.

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.

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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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.

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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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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Sam Rasty, PlateletBio CEO (Oxford Biomedica, via Website)

More than two years after PlateletBio landed its first round of fundraising and a contract with the US government, the company announced its Series B round Thursday.

The preclinical stage biotech out of Watertown, MA announced it raised $75.5 million. The round was led by new investors SymBiosis, K2 HealthVentures, and Oxford Finance, and already-existing investors.

The financing will go toward preclinical development of its lead platelet-like cell program as a therapy for the autoimmune disease immune throbocytopenia. It will help further develop its platform and manufacturing capabilities, and as a result, the managing partner of SymBiosis, Chidozie Ugwumba, will join the board of directors.

As Nitrome Biosciences — a biotech founded in 2017 to focus on a class of enzymes called nitrases — rebrands to Nitrase Therapeutics, the company is also bringing on a new CEO: Pierre Beaurang.

In Nitrase’s statement earlier this week announcing its new CEO, the biotech said that the founder and now-former CEO — Irene Griswold-Prenner — will stay on with Nitrase as the new CSO. And this new appointment comes in tandem with the biotech’s Series A expansion, where Bristol Myers Squibb became an investor alongside AbbVie and Sofinnova Partners, bringing the total amount raised to $45 million.

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.
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