The Chi­na-based biotech Ever­est Med­i­cines has opened the doors to a new man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty to pro­duce mR­NA-based vac­cines.

Ever­est’s new fa­cil­i­ty, which is lo­cat­ed just to the west of Shang­hai in Ji­ashan, Zhe­jiang Province, is around 58,000 square me­ters, or an es­ti­mat­ed 624,306 square feet, and had an in­vest­ment of more than RMB 900 mil­lion ($129 mil­lion). The man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty plans to pro­duce around 700 mil­lion dos­es of mR­NA vac­cine an­nu­al­ly.

One of the cat­a­lysts be­hind the new fa­cil­i­ty is Ever­est reach­ing a “com­pre­hen­sive strate­gic co­op­er­a­tion agree­ment” with Cana­da-based Prov­i­dence Ther­a­peu­tics in Sep­tem­ber of last year to help ad­vance Prov­i­dence’s mR­NA vac­cines and ther­a­pies. Cur­rent­ly, Ever­est is de­vel­op­ing an Omi­cron-based bi­va­lent boost­er can­di­date for Covid-19 and is plan­ning to start clin­i­cal tri­als in Chi­na next year. Ever­est al­so plans to de­vel­op oth­er vac­cines against oth­er in­fec­tious dis­eases and even can­cers with the mR­NA plat­form as well.

“The Covid-19 pan­dem­ic is still rag­ing glob­al­ly, and the evolv­ing vari­ants bring sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges. We are ac­tive­ly ad­vanc­ing the de­vel­op­ment of mR­NA COVID-19 vac­cines to bet­ter pro­tect peo­ple’s health and sup­port Chi­na’s na­tion­al pub­lic pol­i­cy. The start­up of our mR­NA vac­cine fac­to­ry is a key step in our strate­gic goal of hav­ing a com­plete in­dus­tri­al val­ue chain of re­search, clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment, man­u­fac­tur­ing and com­mer­cial­iza­tion” said Rogers Yongqing Luo, Ever­est’s CEO, in a state­ment.

For Ever­est and Prov­i­dence, the open­ing comes at a time when they are see­ing some suc­cess in Covid-19. In Oc­to­ber, Ever­est said that Prov­i­dence’s can­di­date, called PTX-COVID19-B, was non-in­fe­ri­or to Pfiz­er and BioN­Tech’s Comir­naty shot in a Phase II tri­al com­par­ing the vac­cines in 18- to 64-year-olds in Cana­da and South Africa. The re­sults from the study were ob­served two weeks af­ter the sec­ond in­jec­tion, at which point it was found that the in­oc­u­la­tion met the cri­te­ria for non-in­fe­ri­or­i­ty re­gard­ing the geo­met­ric mean titer ra­tio of neu­tral­iz­ing an­ti­bod­ies.

The orig­i­nal deal be­tween Ever­est and Prov­i­dence saw the Cana­di­an biotech get $100 mil­lion up­front in cash, com­bined with an ad­di­tion­al up to $400 mil­lion in prof­it-shar­ing on the Covid-19 vac­cines and mile­stone pay­ments on col­lab­o­ra­tive and ad­di­tion­al prod­ucts. In turn, Ever­est re­ceived the rights to the vac­cines in sev­er­al mar­kets in Asia in­clud­ing Chi­na, Tai­wan, Sin­ga­pore, Thai­land and In­done­sia.

New York City is investing $20 million in biotech this year in the form of a 50,000-square-foot “innovation space” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, complete with offices, research laboratories and events and programming space to grow biotech startups and companies.

Mayor Eric Adams said during his State of The City Address last Thursday that there will be an “emphasis” on making more opportunities for women and people of color to further diversify the industry. The City first reported the news.

Boehringer Ingelheim uncorked some positive results suggesting that Spevigo can help prevent flare-ups in patients with a severe form of psoriasis, months after the drug was approved to treat existing flares.

Spevigo, an IL-36R antibody also known as spesolimab, met its primary and a key secondary endpoint in the Phase IIb EFFISAYIL 2 trial in patients with generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP), Boehringer announced on Monday. While the company is keeping the hard numbers under wraps until later this year, it said in a news release that it anticipates sharing the results with regulators.

AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi won an appeals court win on Monday, as the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found that the companies cannot be forced to provide 340B-discounted drugs purchased by hospitals from an unlimited number of community and specialty pharmacies.

“Legal duties do not spring from silence,” the decision says as the court makes clear that the federal government’s interpretation of the “supposed requirement” that the 340B program compels drugmakers to supply their discounted drugs to an unlimited number of contract pharmacies is not correct, noting:

A US appeals court has ruled against Johnson & Johnson’s use of bankruptcy to deal with mounting talc lawsuits, deciding that doing so would “create a legal blind spot.”

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a previous bankruptcy court decision on Monday, calling for the dismissal of a Chapter 11 filing by J&J’s subsidiary LTL Management.

Faced with more than 38,000 lawsuits alleging its talc-based products caused cancer, J&J spun its talc liabilities into a separate company called LTL Management back in October 2021 and filed for bankruptcy, a controversial move colloquially referred to as a “Texas two-step” bankruptcy. Claimants argued that the strategy is a misuse of the US bankruptcy code — and on Monday, a panel of judges agreed.

Over the past several years, Massachusetts-based contractor Charles River Laboratories has been busy on the M&A front, with the latest, $50 million buyout coming Monday for a provider of high-throughput screening solutions for discovery research.

Chicago-based SAMDI Tech will now be folded into Charles River’s discovery and safety assessment division, Charles River announced.

The $50 million in cash is for the 80% of SAMDI that Charles River didn’t previously own. Other financial details on the deal were not disclosed.