Chi­na’s Gen­Script has brought in new in­vestors to back its bi­o­log­ics-fo­cused sub­sidiary — to the tune of $224 mil­lion.

Gen­Script, which is list­ed in Hong Kong, dis­closed the Se­ries C for Gen­Script Pro­Bio in a fil­ing. The new funds will help “build up man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pac­i­ty, fur­ther re­search and de­vel­op­ment ca­pa­bil­i­ties and op­por­tunis­ti­cal­ly ac­quire as­sets” to de­vel­op Pro­Bio’s con­tract de­vel­op­ment and man­u­fac­tur­ing busi­ness, the moth­er com­pa­ny wrote.

This marks Gen­Script Pro­Bio’s third fi­nanc­ing round in less than two years. Hill­house Cap­i­tal com­mit­ted $150 mil­lion in June 2021 for the Se­ries A, and oth­er in­vestors came on board for a $37 mil­lion Se­ries B just a year lat­er.

While Gen­Script made its name as a provider of drug dis­cov­ery and de­vel­op­ment ser­vices, it is al­so known as the com­pa­ny that cre­at­ed Leg­end Biotech, the dark­horse play­er whose BC­MA-tar­get­ed CAR-T at­tract­ed a top-dol­lar part­ner­ship with J&J. Leg­end was even­tu­al­ly spun out and found its own place on Nas­daq, and the FDA ap­proved its CAR-T last year.

Back in 2019, the unit that would be­come Pro­Bio teamed up with Leg­end Biotech to con­struct a com­mer­cial man­u­fac­tur­ing cen­ter in Zhen­jiang, Chi­na, that could pro­duce plas­mids and virus­es for cell and gene ther­a­pies. Gen­Script un­veiled the Pro­Bio brand lat­er in the sum­mer of 2020.

It’s since signed on mul­ti­ple cus­tomers, in­clud­ing the deep-pock­et­ed mR­NA con­tender Abo­gen, which want­ed its help mak­ing Covid-19 vac­cines. Pro­Bio al­so of­fers ser­vices in an­ti­body dis­cov­ery and en­gi­neer­ing.

Sto­ried VC and pri­vate eq­ui­ty firm Leg­end Cap­i­tal (un­re­lat­ed to Leg­end Biotech) led the round. Oth­er in­vestors in­clude Zhuhai Fen­heng En­ter­prise Man­age­ment Con­sult­ing Cen­ter, HLC VGC and Shang­hai Lian­peng En­ter­prise Man­age­ment Part­ner­ship.

Fol­low­ing the close, Gen­Script’s stake in Pro­Bio drops from around 80% to about 70%.

Eli Lilly has succeeded in its attempt to get the first non-covalent version of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase, or BTK, inhibitors to market, pushing it past rival Merck.

The FDA gave an accelerated nod to Lilly’s daily oral med, to be sold as Jaypirca, for patients with relapsed or refractory mantle cell lymphoma.

The agency’s green light, disclosed by the Indianapolis Big Pharma on Friday afternoon, catapults Lilly into a field dominated by covalent BTK inhibitors, which includes AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson’s Imbruvica, AstraZeneca’s Calquence and BeiGene’s Brukinsa.

The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) voted unanimously in favor of “harmonizing” Covid vaccine compositions, meaning all current vaccine recipients would receive a bivalent vaccine, regardless of whether they’ve gotten their primary series.

The vote marks an effort to clear up confusion around varying formulations and dosing schedules for current primary series and booster vaccines, as well as “get closer to the strains that are circulating,” according to committee member Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The FDA hasn’t detected any potential safety signals, including for stroke, in people aged 65 years and older who have received Pfizer’s bivalent Covid booster, one senior official told members of the agency’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) on Thursday.

The update comes as the FDA and CDC investigate a “preliminary signal” that may indicate an increased risk of ischemic stroke in older Americans who received Pfizer’s updated shot.

The FDA has stopped use of another drug as a result of the new coronavirus variants. On Thursday, the agency announced that AstraZeneca’s antibody combo Evusheld, which was an important prevention option for many immunocompromised people and others, is no longer authorized.

The FDA said it made its decision based on the fact that Evusheld works on fewer than 10% of circulating variants.

Evusheld was initially given emergency authorization at the end of 2021. However, as Omicron emerged, so did studies that showed Evusheld might not work against the dominant Omicron strain. In October, the FDA warned healthcare providers that Evusheld was useless against the Omicron subvariant BA.4.6. It followed that up with another announcement earlier this month that it did not think Evusheld would work against the latest Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5.