As Ire­land con­tin­ues to see more in­vest­ments and build­ing projects from phar­ma com­pa­nies, an­oth­er con­tender is look­ing to place more in­vest­ment in the Emer­ald Isle.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­port from The Irish Times on Fri­day, Ab­bott Lab­o­ra­to­ries is in­vest­ing €440 mil­lion, or about $451 mil­lion, to build a new man­u­fac­tur­ing plant in Kilken­ny, lo­cat­ed in the coun­try’s south­east, to make more of its glu­cose mon­i­tors.

Ac­cord­ing to an Ab­bott spokesper­son in an email to End­points News, the com­pa­ny an­tic­i­pates that more than 800 peo­ple will be em­ployed at the Kilken­ny fa­cil­i­ty once it opens, and the re­main­der will be em­ployed at its site in Done­gal.

“Done­gal is a key man­u­fac­tur­ing site for Ab­bott’s di­a­betes care busi­ness, and we have in­vest­ed heav­i­ly in ex­pand­ing our op­er­a­tions there over the last four years. We’re in­creas­ing our cap­i­tal in­vest­ment in Done­gal in­clud­ing fa­cil­i­ties, pro­duc­tion equip­ment and adding peo­ple to en­able Done­gal to bet­ter sup­port our prod­ucts glob­al­ly,” the Ab­bott spokesper­son said.

For the new 250,000 square-foot build­ing in Kilken­ny, the com­pa­ny will start re­cruit­ment im­me­di­ate­ly for po­si­tions in en­gi­neer­ing, qual­i­ty con­trol and med­ical de­vice man­u­fac­tur­ing, among oth­ers. The site, which the com­pa­ny hopes to have on­line by 2024, will be re­spon­si­ble for the man­u­fac­ture of its Freestyle Li­bre 3 sys­tem for con­tin­u­ous glu­cose mon­i­tor­ing. And the com­pa­ny is bull­ish that it can find the tal­ent.

“The new lo­ca­tion of Kilken­ny is at­trac­tive to our fu­ture em­ploy­ees as the re­gion has strong ed­u­ca­tion­al links with the South-East Tech­no­log­i­cal Uni­ver­si­ty, en­abling us to at­tract grad­u­ates from its Wa­ter­ford and Car­low cam­pus­es,” the spokesper­son said.

Ab­bot has had a heavy pres­ence in Ire­land for over 75 years and cur­rent­ly em­ploys more than 5,000 peo­ple across nine sites. How­ev­er, Ab­bott’s fur­ther com­mit­ment comes at a time when sev­er­al oth­er ma­jor phar­mas are look­ing to snap up Irish soil for man­u­fac­tur­ing.

Mer­ck KGaA, Alex­ion, Eli Lil­ly and SK have all an­nounced ei­ther new ma­jor mul­ti­mil­lion-dol­lar sites or ex­pan­sion projects across the coun­try this year, and the news from Ab­bott shows that the speed of man­u­fac­tur­ing de­vel­op­ment isn’t slow­ing down.

Zoom can only go so far. And I think at this stage, we’ve all tested the limits of staying in touch — virtually. So I’m particularly happy now that we’ve revved up the travel machine to point myself to London for the first time in several years.

Whatever events we have lined up, we’ve always built in plenty of opportunities for all of us to get together and talk. For London, live, I plan to be right out front, meeting with and chatting with the small crowd of biopharma people we are hosting on October 12 at Silicon Valley Bank’s London headquarters. And there’s a lengthy mixer at the end I’m most looking forward to, with several networking openings between sessions.

Carolyn Bertozzi, predicted by some to become a Nobel laureate, clinched one of the world’s top awards in the wee hours of Wednesday, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside a repeat winner and a Copenhagen researcher.

The Stanford professor, Morten Meldal of University of Copenhagen and 2001-awardee K. Barry Sharpless of Scripps shared the prize equally. The Nobel is sometimes split in quarters and/or halves.

Takeda on Tuesday morning made an announcement that almost 3,000 people with the rare disease known as hypoparathyroidism were fearing.

Due to unresolved supply issues and manufacturing woes, Takeda said it will cut its losses and discontinue its hypoparathyroidism drug, known as Natpara (parathyroid hormone), halting all manufacturing of the drug by the end of 2024, but the entire inventory will be available until depleted or expired, a company spokesperson said via email.

As Amylyx gets ready to debut its ALS drug in the US — amid scrutiny and criticism of the price it’s set — the biotech is going back to the public market for some cash to fund the commercial work.

The offering of six million shares is expected to fetch Amylyx anywhere from $167 million to $192.2 million, depending on the final price and whether underwriters exercise their option to buy more shares.

What’s Biohaven without its CGRP portfolio? That’s what CEO Vlad Coric is tasked with deciding as he maps out the new Biohaven post-Pfizer takeover.

Pfizer officially scooped up Biohaven’s CGRP assets on Monday, including blockbuster migraine drug Nurtec and the investigational zavegepant, for $11.6 billion. As a result, Coric spun the broader pipeline into an independent company on Tuesday — with the same R&D team behind Nurtec but about 1,000 fewer staffers and a renewed focus on neuroscience and rare disease.