Af­ter a long-await­ed ap­proval for its CD19 tar­get­ing CAR-T liso-cel, Bris­tol My­ers Squibb is gear­ing up for the loom­ing re­view of an­oth­er cell ther­a­py in its pipeline, ide-cel. Tak­ing not one but two CAR-Ts to mar­ket — and po­ten­tial­ly more — means Bris­tol will have to step on the gas to get its man­u­fac­tur­ing in or­der.

Look­ing to ad­dress that po­ten­tial road­block, Bris­tol will add a 244,000 square-foot cell ther­a­py man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty at its De­vens, MA site as it looks to grow its pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty around liso-cel and, po­ten­tial­ly, ide-cel in the com­ing weeks, the drug­mak­er said Tues­day.

The 89-acre De­vens site in the Boston area will hold the fourth in-house cell ther­a­py man­u­fac­tur­ing site for Bris­tol, along­side fa­cil­i­ties in Both­ell, WA; and War­ren and Sum­mit, NJ. Bris­tol al­so counts con­tract part­ners in the EU and Japan as part of its cell ther­a­py net­work.

The site will pro­duce both clin­i­cal- and com­mer­cial-stage ther­a­pies, and Bris­tol ex­pects to hire “sev­er­al hun­dred em­ploy­ees over the next few years” to scale up the site, ac­cord­ing to a re­lease.

The fi­nan­cial terms of the ex­pan­sion were not dis­closed, and a Bris­tol spokes­woman did not com­ment by press time.

The ex­pan­sion comes at an op­por­tune time for Bris­tol as it looks to take CD19 tar­get­ed liso-cel, mar­ket­ed as Breyanzi and ap­proved ear­li­er this month, to mar­ket. The ther­a­py had a cir­cuitous road to its FDA nod, in­clud­ing a se­ries of man­u­fac­tur­ing sna­fus at a Lon­za Hous­ton con­tract site that led to a Form 483 in De­cem­ber and may have tor­pe­doed a $9 CVR from Bris­tol’s Cel­gene buy­out tied, in part, to liso-cel’s ap­proval by the end of 2020.

Samit Hi­rawat

Mean­while, Bris­tol is gear­ing back up for the FDA’s re­view next month of ide-cel, a BC­MA CAR-T. Just weeks out from a po­ten­tial de­ci­sion, Bris­tol an­nounced two weeks ago that it was pulling an­oth­er CAR-T can­di­date in the pipeline, or­va-cel, out of de­vel­op­ment and writ­ing off $470 mil­lion from its books.

Samit Hi­rawat, head of drug de­vel­op­ment, ex­plained in an an­a­lyst call this month that the de­ci­sion was all about tak­ing the best med­i­cines for­ward — es­pe­cial­ly in a land­scape as crowd­ed as BC­MA, where an au­tol­o­gous CAR-T doesn’t just have to face di­rect ri­vals like Leg­end’s J&J-part­nered cil­ta-cel but al­so an­gle for space among off-the-shelf cell ther­a­pies, bis­pecifics, an­ti­body-drug con­ju­gates and more.

With its Allergan buyout now long in the books, AbbVie has been taking a hard look at its suddenly expansive global ops to find space for a deal. Now, working with a Chinese cell and gene therapy player hungry for more elbow room abroad, AbbVie has taken one UK facility off its books.

AbbVie has offloaded its Liverpool manufacturing site as part of a $118.7 million sale to Chinese cell and gene therapy player Pharmaron, which is pitching the purchase as the next step in its global expansion plans, the companies said last week.

Jazz CEO Bruce Cozadd didn’t beat around the bush.

In his first video meeting with GW Pharma chief Justin Gover last July 8, he offered to pay $172 a share to get the company, which had beaten the odds in getting its remarkable cannabinoid drug Epidiolex across the regulatory finish line for epilepsy. GW’s stock closed at $129 that day.

Cozadd had already done his homework on the financing to make sure he could swing it the way he wanted. He just needed to do some due diligence before making the non-binding bid firm.