One of Flag­ship’s en­ti­ties will be get­ting ac­cess to an AI drug dis­cov­ery tool from con­tract de­vel­op­er and man­u­fac­tur­er Charles Riv­er Lab­o­ra­to­ries.

On Thurs­day, Charles Riv­er an­nounced that Pi­o­neer­ing Med­i­cines, a unit of Flag­ship Pi­o­neer­ing, is seek­ing its ser­vices. The deal will see Pi­o­neer­ing Med­i­cines have ac­cess to Charles Riv­er’s and Va­lo Health’s AI drug dis­cov­ery plat­form, Log­i­ca. Pi­o­neer­ing Med­i­cines plans to use the plat­form across sev­er­al tar­gets to find and cre­ate small mol­e­cules that can be even­tu­al­ly turned in­to new ther­a­pies.

How­ev­er, the de­tails of how many tar­gets or what dis­eases Pi­o­neer­ing Med­i­cines will be go­ing af­ter were not im­me­di­ate­ly avail­able. The fi­nan­cial terms of the deal were al­so not dis­closed. End­points News reached out to both Charles Riv­er and Pi­o­neer­ing Med­i­cines for fur­ther in­for­ma­tion.

In the re­lease, Charles Riv­er’s chief sci­en­tif­ic of­fi­cer Julie Frear­son not­ed that the Log­i­ca plat­form can get a drug can­di­date in­to de­vel­op­ment in around two years.

Pi­o­neer­ing Med­i­cines, which launched in 2020, has been on a mis­sion to build out its R&D ca­pa­bil­i­ties. So far, the Flag­ship out­fit has part­nered with the Cys­tic Fi­bro­sis Foun­da­tion and with No­vo Nordisk to forge re­search agree­ments.

“By uti­liz­ing Log­i­ca, a unique­ly in­te­grat­ed AI plat­form, we’re hope­ful that we can more quick­ly ad­vance well-char­ac­ter­ized mol­e­cules through the de­vel­op­ment process and cre­ate and de­liv­er nov­el med­i­cines for pa­tients soon­er,” Pi­o­neer­ing Med­i­cines pres­i­dent Paul Bion­di said in a re­lease.

The Log­i­ca plat­form it­self was launched last year, with Charles Riv­er part­ner­ing with Va­lo Health to cre­ate the plat­form.

Charles Riv­er has al­so been fo­cused on drug dis­cov­ery tech as of late. At the end of Jan­u­ary, it ac­quired SAM­DI Tech for $50 mil­lion af­ter join­ing forces on sev­er­al part­ner­ships with the screen­ing so­lu­tion provider. The com­pa­ny will be fold­ed in­to Charles Riv­er’s dis­cov­ery and safe­ty as­sess­ment di­vi­sion.

Ed­i­tor’s Note: This sto­ry has been up­dat­ed to re­flect that Log­i­ca is joint­ly run be­tween Charles Riv­er Lab­o­ra­to­ries and Va­lo Health 

The mRNA player Moderna is further cementing its presence on the African continent.

Moderna announced on Thursday that it has finalized an agreement with Kenya’s government to partner up and bring an mRNA manufacturing facility to the east African nation. The new facility aims to manufacture up to 500 million doses of vaccines annually. Moderna also said the new facility will have the ability to spike its production capabilities to respond to public health emergencies on the continent or globally.

Catalent will be manufacturing a low-cost version of the opioid overdose treatment naloxone as part of a contract with Harm Reduction Therapeutics.

Catalent plans to manufacture the treatment at its facility in Morrisville, NC. No financial details on the deal were disclosed.

Harm Reduction was granted priority review status for the NDA on its spray last year. The company has been working on a naloxone product since 2017. It is anticipating approval in July of this year and a US launch in early 2024.

Last year, South African-based vaccine manufacturer Aspen Pharmacare was facing reports that it had not received a single order for its manufactured Covid-19 shots and that manufacturing lines were sitting idle. But now the vaccine producer is looking to turn things around.

Aspen’s disclosure of its financial results in March unveiled that manufacturing revenue had decreased by 12% to R 603 million ($33.8 million), which Lorraine Hill, Aspen Group’s COO, said is attributable to lower Covid vaccine sales.

Thermo Fisher Scientific is putting down more roots in the Bay Area.

The manufacturer opened the doors to a new cell therapy manufacturing facility next to the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center’s Mission Bay campus and on the university’s campus.

UCSF and Thermo Fisher have had a partnership since 2021, with the new site focusing on manufacturing cell therapeutics for certain cancers, including glioblastoma and multiple myeloma. The new site plans to use Thermo Fisher’s expertise in manufacturing services to help UCSF accelerate the development of cell therapies and eventually get them into the clinic, said Dan Herring, the general manager of cell therapy services at Thermo Fisher, in an interview with Endpoints News.

Dallas-based biotech Nanoscope Therapeutics unveiled Phase II results on its gene therapy for a rare eye disease Thursday morning.

In the RESTORE trial, 18 patients with retinitis pigmentosa got a gene therapy called MCO-010 while nine got placebo. On a vision test called the MLYMT, the treatment group had a one-point greater change over one year in their score compared to the placebo group, the primary endpoint of the study. However, the 95% confidence interval was 0.0 to 3.0, meaning the result was not statistically significant. The p-value was not provided.

Belgian biotech Confo Therapeutics has landed $183 million, plus potential royalties, in a drug-discovery deal with Daiichi Sankyo.

Early Thursday, Confo Therapeutics put out word of the deal that will be focused on small molecule antagonists to go after an undisclosed target that the company says is associated with CNS diseases.

Confo CEO Cedric Ververken told Endpoints News that Daiichi originally reached out to learn about the biotech’s technology. He added that Confo, founded in 2015, will use its platform to drug a GPCR target that Daiichi has struggled with internally.