The year 2020 has been busy for contract manufacturers, a trend which is holding strong as an unprecedented 12 months draw to a close. Swiss CDMO Lonza, one of the biggest players in the field and under the recent leadership of Roche vet Pierre-Alain Ruffieux, has been at the forefront of that outsourcing boom, and now it’s looking to keep on growing for what could be an even busier future.

Buoyed by deals to produce 1 billion worldwide doses of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, Lonza announced an expansion Monday that will increase its production capacity 30% by the first half of 2022.

Biologics have been particularly hot in 2020 with big drugmakers looking to bolster their portfolio — a trend that has been a serious boon for contract manufacturers. WuXi Biologics started off the year adding to its own production capacity in Germany to keep up with that expected demand, and now it’s going back to Deutschland for another expansion.

Shanghai-based Wuxi will drop roughly 150 million euros—or $183.3 million— in an acquisition deal for Bayer’s 330,000 square-foot drug substance facility in Wuppertal, Germany, as it seeks to enhance a supply network of Covid-19 vaccines and other biologics. The newest facility will also add to WuXi’s “global dual sourcing” strategy to add redundancy into its supply chain, CEO Chris Chen said in a release.

China’s cost advantage and position as the world’s second-largest prescription drug market has fueled its red-hot CRO industry over the last few years. On Thursday, Shanghai-based dMed Biopharmaceutical wrapped up a $100 million Series C round, which it says will blaze the path to an IPO.

Founded in 2016 by Lingshi Tan, Pfizer’s former general manager of China R&D, dMed boasts sites in major cities across China, the US, and one location in Belgium. It hooked a $50 million Series B just last year, and opened a US regulatory affairs office in DC to help Chinese biotechs submit US filings and serve as a conduit for US drugmakers looking to outsource development to China.

It’s been a whirlwind week for Thermo Fisher.

Over the course of five days prior to Wednesday, the Massachusetts CDMO had announced two major expansion projects across the globe, both of which will increase the company’s footprint in the vaccine marketplace. And now, Thermo has unveiled a third major expansion project — this time, a new cGMP facility specializing in the production of plasmid DNA at its Carlsbad, California site.

Riding a wave of red-hot investments in biologics, Samsung Biologics — the biopharma CDMO arm of the South Korean tech giant — is stringing together a series of major down payments on manufacturing. Now, the firm has found the right leader to steer it into its next phase, and it didn’t have to look far.

Samsung Biologics has chosen John Rim, a three-year executive VP, to be its next president and CEO, citing his contributions in rapidly expanding the CDMO’s manufacturing capacities since he joined the company in 2018.

Just days after announcing wide-ranging expansions at four facilities in the US and Europe, manufacturing giant Thermo Fisher isn’t slowing down. Aiming to ramp up its clinical supply chain offerings — particularly to aid the Covid-19 response effort — the CDMO is spreading out in Germany with two new facilities.

Thermo has two new facilities in Rheinfelden and Weil am Rhein, Germany, going online this month and next, respectively. Like the four recently announced site expansions, Thermo is keeping the cost close to the chest.

Two years after its leading asthma therapy flopped in a Phase III study, the UK’s Vectura switched gears to focus on manufacturing inhalable drugs for other biopharma companies. Now, it’s doubling down on that manufacturing angle with a new expansion at its UK production facilities.

Vectura unveiled this week an expansion of its capabilities to handle and develop highly potent active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) at its headquarters in Chippenham, England. The project will include installing six new containment isolators, which will house development manufacturing equipment for dispensing, blending, co-milling, jet-milling, spray-drying and blister-fill packaging — turning the facility into a newly-modeled product development manufacturing lab.

In a big year for contract manufacturers, Massachusetts’ Thermo Fisher Scientific has emerged as a leading partner for drugmakers fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in diagnostics and therapeutics. Now, buoyed by that success and looking to scale up its vaccine offerings, Thermo Fisher is plotting big expansion across its global portfolio.

Thermo Fisher will expand its facilities in Greenville, NC; Ferentino and Monza, Italy; and Swindon, England, to expand its range of offerings for customers”whether it’s an emerging biotech working on a vaccine for a novel virus or a high-volume pharmaceutical manufacturer delivering necessary medicines at scale,” a spokesperson told Endpoints News.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire libertarian who quietly backed away in 2020 from his once-ardent support of President Donald Trump, is no stranger to government contracts. His company Palantir has secured dozens of contracts with the feds and now has another big fish on the hook.

Palantir, the Denver-based data and analytics company Thiel co-founded in 2003, entered into an agreement this week with the FDA as the government agency struggles to keep up with a surge of regulatory approval needs due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Biologics manufacturing is an expensive and complicated process — but that hasn’t stopped some of the biopharma industry’s biggest players from making big splashes in recent years. Now, a Seattle-based CDMO is dropping a major down payment to double its presence in the field.

Citing an increased demand from global partners, Seattle-based AGC Biologics will pour $194 million into fleshing out its biologics manufacturing at its Copenhagen site, the company said late last month. The roughly 204,000-square-foot expansion in a new building will allow the global CDMO to double its capacity for work with single-use bioreactor mammalian cell-cultures.