Ger­man phar­ma gi­ant Bay­er will be look­ing to make a sig­nif­i­cant in­vest­ment in­to one of its US plants that pro­duces over-the-counter drugs.

Bay­er an­nounced that it will spend $43.6 mil­lion to ex­pand its fa­cil­i­ty in My­er­stown, PA, a small town east of Har­ris­burg. Bay­er plans to in­crease the site by 70,000 square feet and will have room for the in­stal­la­tion of eight pack­ag­ing lines and an area to in­stall rooftop so­lar pan­els. The project is ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed by 2025 and will add around 50 to 75 jobs.

Much of Bay­er’s OTC pro­file comes from the My­er­stown fa­cil­i­ty, in­clud­ing brands such as Clar­itin, Mi­dol, Al­ka-Seltzer and nu­mer­ous oth­er prod­ucts, man­u­fac­tur­ing a to­tal of 14.1 bil­lion tablets and 3.9 mil­lion liq­uid liters in 2021. The site is spread over 68 acres with over half a mil­lion square feet and em­ploys over 630 peo­ple.

To­ward the be­gin­ning of the year, Bay­er said that it was plan­ning to in­vest more than $2.26 bil­lion in­to its phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal man­u­fac­tur­ing ap­pa­ra­tus over the next three years by ex­pand­ing fa­cil­i­ties in the US and Eu­rope. The Big Phar­ma al­so plans to mod­ern­ize and stream­line process­es at the fa­cil­i­ty.

Bay­er will in­vest more than $2.26 bil­lion in its phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal man­u­fac­tur­ing over the next three years, as it looks to ex­pand sites both in Eu­rope and the US.

Oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers have al­so been mak­ing sig­nif­i­cant in­vest­ments in Penn­syl­va­nia this year.

West Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal Ser­vices, a mak­er of vials, pre-fil­l­able sy­ringes and self-in­jec­tion prod­ucts, will in­vest $65 mil­lion to ex­pand its man­u­fac­tur­ing site in the town of Jer­sey Shore, PA a few miles down the road from Williamsport, PA. West is al­so plan­ning to in­crease its head­count at its HQ in Ex­ton, PA.

The Al­mac Group, a glob­al con­tract­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny for APIs and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, is al­so ex­pand­ing its North Amer­i­can head­quar­ters in the town of Soud­er­ton, PA, north­west of Philadel­phia with the same $65 mil­lion in­vest­ment.

And in the west­ern part of the state, El­e­vate­Bio and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh say they’ve signed a 30-year deal for El­e­vate­Bio to man­u­fac­ture cell and gene ther­a­pies in Pitts­burgh. The agree­ment will have El­e­vate­Bio lo­cate its Base­Camp and GMP man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ties in the city, with the site even­tu­al­ly run­ning gene edit­ing, in­duced pluripo­tent stem cell (iP­SC) and cell, vec­tor and pro­tein en­gi­neer­ing ef­forts.

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.

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.