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.

Facing the big dogs in the PD-(L)1 space, AstraZeneca has taken its own contender Imfinzi into blockbuster territory in its four years on the market but sees even bigger things for the drug. Combinations could be the key, and early results from a mid-stage test are adding some fuel to that strategy.

Imfinzi combined with one of two investigational immunotherapies — a CD73 antibody dubbed oleclumab or an Innate’s anti-NGK2a named monalizumab — topped Imfinzi alone in terms of overall response and progression-free survival in patients with stage III non-small cell lung cancer whose tumors had not worsened during concurrent chemoradiation, according to interim data from the Phase II COAST trial set to be presented at #ESMO21.

One Spanish biotech is beefing up its plasma therapy operations, and on Friday, it announced that it’s doing so in a billion-dollar deal.

Grifols is now the largest shareholder of Biotest, a company valued at more than $1.8 billion. By teaming up, the two will try to increase the number of plasma therapies available and increase patient access around the world, Grifols said in a press release.

The company did so by acquiring holding company Tiancheng Pharmaceutical, the Germany-based owner of nearly 90% of Biotest shares, for nearly $1.27 billion. Grifols now owns nearly 90% of Biotest voting rights and almost 45% of the total share capital of Biotest.

The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT played a significant role in mapping out genes as part of the Human Genome Project about two decades ago. Now, it’s joining forces with one of the industry’s largest research foundations in an effort to translate those maps.

The Novo Nordisk Foundation, which operates independently from the biotech Novo Nordisk, is teeing up $47.5 million to work with the Broad on mining genetic data in the hopes of better understanding how variants drive disease.

The FDA released briefing documents this week from the agency and Pfizer each outlining their arguments for today’s Covid-19 booster shot adcomm, but one thing conspicuously missing was the question on which panel members would be voting. But late Thursday night, regulators published that question.

Adcomm members will be asked whether or not the safety and efficacy data from Pfizer/BioNTech’s original Phase III study “support approval” of a booster shot at least six months after the second dose in individuals older than 16. The question notably excludes the real-world data from Israel and other analyses that Pfizer and the Biden administration had said would be a centerpiece of their arguments for boosters.

→ Last week we told you about the CMO revolving door at ADC Therapeutics, as Joseph Camardo replaced the departing Jay Feingold. The next opportunity for Feingold in the CMO slot has opened up at antibody-drug conjugate and mAb developer Pyxis Oncology, which has added several new execs and scientific advisory board members in recent months, including ex-Immunovant CFO Pamela Yanchik Connealy. Before his tenure at ADC, Feingold was Daiichi Sankyo’s VP of US medical affairs and chairman of the Global Medical Affairs Oversight Committee. Within weeks in March, Pyxis struck a licensing deal with Pfizer for two of its ADCs and raked in $152 million from a Series B round.