Charles Riv­er Labs, one of the biggest CROs that spe­cial­izes in pre­clin­i­cal re­search pro­grams, has inked a new dis­cov­ery pact as part of a string of deals over the last few years. And af­ter the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic proved less of a fi­nan­cial bur­den than ex­pect­ed, the com­pa­ny could be ready to make even more moves.

Charles Riv­er $CRL pur­chased an­ti­body dis­cov­ery com­pa­ny Dis­trib­uted Bio for up to $104 mil­lion, the com­pa­nies an­nounced Mon­day, a fig­ure that in­cludes $83 mil­lion in up­front cash. The oth­er $21 mil­lion in the deal is re­served for fu­ture “per­for­mance” pay­ments.

With the ac­qui­si­tion, Charles Riv­er hopes to “meet our goal of elim­i­nat­ing an ad­di­tion­al year from our clients’ ear­ly-stage de­vel­op­ment time­lines,” Charles Riv­er CEO James Fos­ter said in a state­ment. Shares ticked up­ward rough­ly 1% in ear­ly Mon­day trad­ing.

The goal of the deal is to give more clients ac­cess to Dis­tri­b­u­tion Bio’s pro­pri­etary plat­form, which is called Su­per­Hu­man. By com­bin­ing an­ti­body li­braries and data­bas­es with a ma­chine learn­ing de­sign, the plat­form can cut the dis­cov­ery process by sev­er­al months, the com­pa­nies said.

Mon­day’s deal al­so marks the for­mal­iza­tion of an ex­clu­sive part­ner­ship the two com­pa­nies struck in Oc­to­ber 2018. Back then, the com­pa­nies had aimed to cre­ate a new plat­form for an­ti­body dis­cov­ery, mar­ry­ing Charles Riv­er’s re­sources with Su­per­Hu­man.

Charles Riv­er has been on an ac­qui­si­tion spree in re­cent years, drop­ping $800 mil­lion for ri­val CRO MPI Re­search in Feb­ru­ary 2018, one of its biggest com­peti­tors in the pre­clin­i­cal sphere. The fol­low­ing Feb­ru­ary, the com­pa­ny paid north of half a bil­lion dol­lars to buy out Citoxlab and its slate of non-clin­i­cal ex­perts, beef­ing up tox­i­col­o­gy, dis­cov­ery, ge­nomics and med­ical de­vice test­ing ser­vices while ex­pand­ing its foot­print in Eu­rope.

The CRO had al­so been part­ner­ing with Ei­sai for years in pre­clin­i­cal work, ex­tend­ing a two-year col­lab­o­ra­tion in 2017 for an­oth­er year to work on pre­clin­i­cal med­i­cines for malar­ia.

But the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic halt­ed much of Charles Riv­er’s mo­men­tum, as well as the mo­men­tum of the en­tire CRO in­dus­try, when it forced more than 1,000 clin­i­cal tri­als to hit the pause but­ton in the ear­ly stages of the out­break. Back in May, the CRO re­port­ed that it need­ed to adopt a va­ri­ety of cost-cut­ting mea­sures due to the pan­dem­ic, and ex­pect­ed to chop away $55 mil­lion to $90 mil­lion in 2020 costs.

In sec­ond quar­ter and third quar­ter earn­ings re­ports, how­ev­er, Fos­ter not­ed that the Covid-19 head­winds end­ed up be­ing more mod­er­ate than they’d orig­i­nal­ly an­tic­i­pat­ed. For 2020’s third quar­ter, the com­pa­ny’s rev­enue was up 11.3% over the same time pe­ri­od in 2019.

Charles Riv­er op­er­ates more than 90 fa­cil­i­ties in at least 20 coun­tries and notes it sup­port­ed de­vel­op­ment for about 85% of FDA ap­proved drugs in 2019.

While the US biosimilars industry has generally been a disappointment since its inception, with FDA approving 33 biosimilars since 2015, just a fraction of those have immediately followed their approvals with launches. And more than a handful of biosimilars for two of the biggest blockbusters of all time — AbbVie’s Humira and Amgen’s Enbrel — remain approved by FDA but still have not launched because of legal settlements.

Kura Oncology is clear to resume studies for its early-stage leukemia program after the FDA lifted a clinical hold Thursday afternoon.

Regulators had placed the hold on a Phase Ib study of KO-539, an experimental oral treatment for some genetic subsets of acute myeloid leukemia last November after a patient died while taking the drug. Kura expects to begin enrolling patients again imminently, CEO Troy Wilson told Endpoints News.