The Ger­man-based cannabis med­i­cine pro­duc­er Avex­tra has reeled in some new funds while al­so look­ing to ex­pand its reach with­in Eu­rope.

Avex­tra an­nounced Wednes­day that it se­cured a to­tal of €17 mil­lion ($17.9 mil­lion) in a cap­i­tal raise. The com­pa­ny said in a re­lease that the cash will be go­ing to­ward sev­er­al av­enues of its busi­ness, which in­clude ex­pand­ing the sales of its cur­rent prod­ucts in new mar­kets in Eu­rope and boost­ing the de­vel­op­ment of new cannabis-based med­i­cines and prod­ucts. Avex­tra al­so plans to ex­pand its re­search and de­vel­op­ment work and grow its pres­ence in Por­tu­gal, where the com­pa­ny has a cul­ti­va­tion fa­cil­i­ty.

It’s al­so plan­ning to launch more pa­tient stud­ies and clin­i­cal tri­als with its prod­ucts. End­points News reached out to the com­pa­ny to get more de­tails on the raise but did not get a re­sponse by press time.

“We will con­tin­ue build­ing on our suc­cess to make Avex­tra a leader in com­pound med­i­cines in Ger­many and se­lect­ed Eu­ro­pean ge­o­gra­phies while al­so ac­cel­er­at­ing our unique path to­wards IP and Rx prod­ucts. Avex­tra will be­gin sev­er­al clin­i­cal tri­als in 2023 in Ger­many and Por­tu­gal,” said Bern­hard Ba­bel, co-CEO of Avex­tra, in a re­lease.

Avex­tra’s R&D pro­gram is based in Ger­many and Por­tu­gal, and the com­pa­ny man­u­fac­tures its cannabis-based med­i­cines in a 100,000-square-foot Ger­man-based fa­cil­i­ty. The com­pa­ny has been ex­pand­ing through­out Eu­rope since it en­tered the UK mar­ket in Feb­ru­ary.

The raise had sup­port from ex­ist­ing in­vestors in Avex­tra, the man­age­ment team and ad­di­tion­al in­vestors in Eu­rope, but no spe­cif­ic groups or com­pa­nies were named.

Avex­tra is not the on­ly play­er look­ing to ex­pand its reach in the cannabis in­dus­try. Jazz Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals an­nounced last year it would place $100 mil­lion in­to a new 60,000-square-foot fa­cil­i­ty in the UK to sup­port the pro­duc­tion of two cannabis-based med­i­cines.

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.