A life sci­ence CD­MO is in­vest­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in­to man­u­fac­tur­ing nu­cle­ic acids amid in­creas­ing de­mand for ac­tive phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­gre­di­ents, or API.

Ag­i­lent Tech­nolo­gies, which spun out of Amer­i­can tech gi­ant Hewlett Packard back in 1999, put the word out on Mon­day, say­ing that the $725 mil­lion will be used to dou­ble the com­pa­ny’s cur­rent man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pac­i­ty for ther­a­peu­tic nu­cle­ic acids. These nu­cle­ic acids, al­so known as ther­a­peu­tic oligonu­cleotides, are DNA or RNA mol­e­cules that act as the API for cer­tain drugs that tar­get in­di­ca­tions such as can­cer or rare dis­eases.

Ag­i­lent said that the ex­pan­sion will specif­i­cal­ly meet the grow­ing de­mand for siR­NA, an­ti­sense and CRISPR guide RNA mol­e­cules.

CEO Mike Mc­Mullen said in a state­ment that the in­vest­ment is a re­flec­tion of “strong de­mand” for ther­a­peu­tic oligonu­cleotides. The com­pa­ny added that the mar­ket for ther­a­peu­tic oli­gos is es­ti­mat­ed to be a bil­lion-dol­lar mar­ket, and close to dou­ble that by 2027.

In or­der for the com­pa­ny to dou­ble its ca­pac­i­ty, Ag­i­lent is ex­pand­ing its man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty in the town of Fred­er­ick, Col­orado, which opened back in 2019. An Ag­i­lent spokesper­son told End­points News via email that the ex­pan­sion will add 198,000 square feet to the fa­cil­i­ty and dou­ble the fa­cil­i­ty’s ded­i­cat­ed man­u­fac­tur­ing space.

It will be adding two new man­u­fac­tur­ing lines to its fa­cil­i­ty, which cur­rent­ly has one man­u­fac­tur­ing line op­er­a­tional, and an­oth­er line — which Ag­i­lent in­vest­ed $150 mil­lion in­to in 2020 — is planned to be­come op­er­a­tional lat­er this year. The com­pa­ny said that it is plan­ning on break­ing ground on the ex­pan­sion lat­er this month, and it plans on start­ing cus­tomer ship­ments from the ex­pan­sion by the end of 2026.

A spokesper­son added that the ex­pan­sion will al­so gen­er­ate 160 new jobs in the state. A press re­lease from Col­orado Gov­er­nor Jared Po­lis’ of­fice on Mon­day said that the state’s Eco­nom­ic De­vel­op­ment Com­mis­sion ap­proved up to $1,787,500 in a per­for­mance-based in­cen­tive over a 5-year pe­ri­od, at $6,500 per net new job. That in­cen­tive is con­tin­gent up­on Ag­i­lent meet­ing new job cre­ation and salary re­quire­ments, as well as lo­cal match in­cen­tives.

Both the town of Fred­er­ick and the coun­ty the fa­cil­i­ty is lo­cat­ed in, Weld Coun­ty, con­tributed to a lo­cal in­cen­tive pack­age that will be at least $9.3 mil­lion over a ten-year time frame.

Ed­i­tor’s note: This sto­ry has been up­dat­ed to in­clude com­ment from Ag­i­lent and ad­di­tion­al in­for­ma­tion on the in­cen­tive pack­age.

New York City is investing $20 million in biotech this year in the form of a 50,000-square-foot “innovation space” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, complete with offices, research laboratories and events and programming space to grow biotech startups and companies.

Mayor Eric Adams said during his State of The City Address last Thursday that there will be an “emphasis” on making more opportunities for women and people of color to further diversify the industry. The City first reported the news.

Boehringer Ingelheim uncorked some positive results suggesting that Spevigo can help prevent flare-ups in patients with a severe form of psoriasis, months after the drug was approved to treat existing flares.

Spevigo, an IL-36R antibody also known as spesolimab, met its primary and a key secondary endpoint in the Phase IIb EFFISAYIL 2 trial in patients with generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP), Boehringer announced on Monday. While the company is keeping the hard numbers under wraps until later this year, it said in a news release that it anticipates sharing the results with regulators.

AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi won an appeals court win on Monday, as the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found that the companies cannot be forced to provide 340B-discounted drugs purchased by hospitals from an unlimited number of community and specialty pharmacies.

“Legal duties do not spring from silence,” the decision says as the court makes clear that the federal government’s interpretation of the “supposed requirement” that the 340B program compels drugmakers to supply their discounted drugs to an unlimited number of contract pharmacies is not correct, noting:

A US appeals court has ruled against Johnson & Johnson’s use of bankruptcy to deal with mounting talc lawsuits, deciding that doing so would “create a legal blind spot.”

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a previous bankruptcy court decision on Monday, calling for the dismissal of a Chapter 11 filing by J&J’s subsidiary LTL Management.

Faced with more than 38,000 lawsuits alleging its talc-based products caused cancer, J&J spun its talc liabilities into a separate company called LTL Management back in October 2021 and filed for bankruptcy, a controversial move colloquially referred to as a “Texas two-step” bankruptcy. Claimants argued that the strategy is a misuse of the US bankruptcy code — and on Monday, a panel of judges agreed.

Over the past several years, Massachusetts-based contractor Charles River Laboratories has been busy on the M&A front, with the latest, $50 million buyout coming Monday for a provider of high-throughput screening solutions for discovery research.

Chicago-based SAMDI Tech will now be folded into Charles River’s discovery and safety assessment division, Charles River announced.

The $50 million in cash is for the 80% of SAMDI that Charles River didn’t previously own. Other financial details on the deal were not disclosed.