How far can $24 mil­lion get you? For Wash­ing­ton-based Bi­o­Life So­lu­tions, the an­swer is all the way to In­di­anapo­lis.

Bi­o­Life So­lu­tions, a top provider of tools and ser­vices for cell and gene ther­a­py de­vel­op­ment, is putting down a mod­est $24 mil­lion to snap up all the shares in Sex­ton Biotech­nolo­gies it doesn’t al­ready own, the part­ners said on Mon­day. In the process, it’s get­ting a slate of new bio­pro­duc­tion tools, and the deed to Sex­ton’s down­town In­di­anapo­lis fa­cil­i­ty.

“As a sig­nif­i­cant share­hold­er of Sex­ton since their spin­out from Cook Re­gen­tec in 2019, we’ve been close­ly fol­low­ing Sean Wern­er and the Sex­ton team’s great ex­e­cu­tion and progress,” CEO Mike Rice said in a state­ment, adding that Sex­ton is at an “in­flec­tion point.”

The com­pa­ny was not avail­able for an in­ter­view be­fore press time.

Bi­o­Life has in­vest­ed in Sex­ton since 2019, when it be­came the first start­up to spin out of the life sci­ences in­cu­ba­tor Cook Re­gen­tec. Over the last two years, Sex­ton has de­vel­oped a hand­ful of tools to aid cell and gene ther­a­py de­vel­op­ment, in­clud­ing its CellSeal closed vial for fi­nal dose pack­ag­ing, which was used by Bris­tol My­ers Squibb for its re­cent­ly ap­proved CAR-T for lym­phoma, Breyanzi.

Sex­ton al­so touts its hu­man platelet lysate (HPL) me­dia, bio-de­fined re­place­ment for fe­tal bovine serum or hu­man serum used in cell man­u­fac­tur­ing, and au­to­mat­ed cell pro­cess­ing ma­chines, which it says are used in more than 50 on­go­ing tri­als.

Rice is keep­ing all of Sex­ton’s staff on board, in­clud­ing a five-per­son sales team that will piv­ot to pro­mote Bi­o­Life’s prod­ucts, in­clud­ing its bio­p­reser­va­tion tools, wa­ter-free thaw­ing prod­ucts and cold chain man­age­ment plat­form.

Over­all, Sex­ton is ex­pect­ed to con­tribute about $2 mil­lion to Bi­o­Life’s 2021 rev­enue, ac­cord­ing to a state­ment. Bi­o­Life reeled in $48 mil­lion in 2020, up 76% from the pre­vi­ous year. Next year, the com­pa­ny is hop­ing to bring in be­tween $108 and $117 mil­lion.

In­vestors were most­ly mut­ed on the news, with Bi­o­Life’s stock $BLFS up a lit­tle over 2% on Mon­day morn­ing.

The US pharma giant Eli Lilly will be increasing its financial commitment to a manufacturing site in Ireland.

According to a release from Ireland’s Industrial Development Agency (IDA) on Monday, Lilly will be investing another $500 million in its manufacturing facility in Limerick, Ireland — bringing the total investment into the facility to approximately $1 billion.

In January of last year, Lilly announced it was placing a $446 million investment into the site to expand active pharmaceutical ingredient and monoclonal antibody production.

DC District Court Judge Christopher Cooper today granted Vanda Pharma’s request to require the FDA to disclose more info on the complete response letter for its sleep disorder drug Hetlioz.

The melatonin receptor agonist is approved by the FDA to treat non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder, a circadian rhythm disorder. But in 2018 Vanda filed a supplemental application to market Hetlioz as a treatment for jet lag, which the FDA rejected in August 2019, with few details on what Vanda needed to correct course, according to the company.