Con­tract man­u­fac­tur­ing work has grown at a rapid clip the past year giv­en de­mand caused in part by Covid-19. Big play­ers are dou­bling down on their pro­duc­tion foot­prints, and even small play­ers are tak­ing big swings to get in­to the game.

Min­neso­ta’s Ani Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals will shell out $89.5 mil­lion in cash and $74 mil­lion in eq­ui­ty to ac­quire New Jer­sey gener­ics play­er Novi­tium Phar­ma, al­low­ing it rapid­ly scale its man­u­fac­tur­ing and R&D in­fra­struc­ture for gener­ics, the drug­mak­er said this week.

The deal comes with an ad­di­tion­al $46.5 mil­lion in po­ten­tial fu­ture pay­outs, bring­ing the over­all val­ue of the ac­qui­si­tion to around $210 mil­lion, Ani said.

Ani will im­me­di­ate­ly add Novi­tium’s ad­vanced pipeline of gener­ic drugs, where it has pro­ject­ed 25 or more new launch­es in the next year. But the ac­qui­si­tion will al­so bol­ster con­tract man­u­fac­tur­ing and R&D work mov­ing for­ward.

Novi­tium will bring nine new cus­tomers in­to the fold as well as a 50,000-square-foot fa­cil­i­ty in East Wind­sor, New Jer­sey fa­cil­i­ty with 27 man­u­fac­tur­ing suites and eight clin­i­cal suites. That fa­cil­i­ty is al­so cur­rent­ly un­der­go­ing a 20,000-square-foot ex­pan­sion that will bring an­oth­er 18 man­u­fac­tur­ing suites on­line. The com­pa­ny’s an­nu­al pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty is around 2 bil­lion dos­es of its tablets, cap­sules, liq­uid sus­pen­sions and so­lu­tions, pow­ders and pow­der for oral sus­pen­sion, con­trolled re­lease and po­tent com­pounds.

On the R&D side, Novi­tium will bring over the 21 ab­bre­vi­at­ed new drug ap­pli­ca­tions it cur­rent­ly has filed with the FDA and more than 30 oth­er prod­ucts un­der de­vel­op­ment, Ani said. The drug­mak­er al­so has three 505(b)(2) can­di­dates in on­col­o­gy and hy­per­ten­sion un­der de­vel­op­ment — ef­fec­tive­ly drugs that fall some­where in the mid­dle be­tween gener­ics and NDAs.

The ac­qui­si­tion comes as busi­ness in the con­tract man­u­fac­tur­ing field has run red hot in re­cent months with Covid-19 up­ping the de­mand for sup­ply chain re­dun­dan­cy and big work or­ders.

Just this week, ma­jor CD­MO play­er Ther­mo Fish­er Sci­en­tif­ic an­nounced plans to drop $600 mil­lion in­to its glob­al man­u­fac­tur­ing net­work as part of a move to ramp up its short-term Covid-19 work and more than dou­ble its ca­pac­i­ty for the fu­ture.

Tar­get­ing 11 sites spread through­out the Amer­i­c­as, Eu­rope and Asia, Ther­mo ex­pects to add 1,500 em­ploy­ees to its glob­al work­force in or­der to ex­pand its bio­pro­cess­ing ca­pac­i­ty for sin­gle-use tech, cell cul­ture me­dia and pu­rifi­ca­tion. The ex­pan­sions are set to be com­plet­ed by 2022.

As concerns rise around the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines, global attention is increasingly turning to the little, 33-year-old, productless, bankruptcy-flirting biotech that could: Novavax.

In the now 16-month race to develop and deploy Covid-19 vaccines, Novavax has at times seemed like the pandemic’s most unsuspecting frontrunner and at times like an overhyped also-ran. Although they started the pandemic with only enough cash to last 6 months, they leveraged old connections and believers into $2 billion and emerged last summer with data experts said surpassed Pfizer and Moderna. They unveiled plans to quickly scale to 2 billion doses. Then they couldn’t even make enough material to run their US trial and watched four other companies beat them to the finish line.

The FDA wrapped up its inspection of Emergent’s troubled vaccine manufacturing plant in Baltimore on Tuesday, after halting production there on Monday. By Wednesday morning, the agency already released a series of scathing observations on the cross contamination, sanitary issues and lack of staff training that caused the contract manufacturer to dispose of millions of AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine doses.

The House Oversight Committee is investigating Covid-19 vaccine producer Emergent BioSolutions, which secured a $628 million US government contract to make AstraZeneca and J&J vaccines despite “a long, documented history” of quality control issues, Democrats said in a letter to the contract manufacturer’s executives.

Emergent’s Baltimore plant, which was shuttered on Monday by FDA, has been embroiled in controversy after being forced to destroy millions of AstraZeneca and J&J doses due to an ingredient mix-up and possible contamination.