Al­most halfway in­to the big turn­around year that Hal Bar­ron has blue­print­ed for Glax­o­SmithK­line’s R&D team, the Big Phar­ma is un­veil­ing a $231 mil­lion man­u­fac­tur­ing deal to match the grow­ing com­mer­cial port­fo­lio.

In a new part­ner­ship, GSK has en­list­ed Sam­sung Bi­o­log­ics to pro­vide ad­di­tion­al man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pac­i­ty for its com­mer­cial spe­cial­ty care drugs, be­gin­ning with the lu­pus drug Benlysta. Pro­duc­tion will take place in Sam­sung’s fa­cil­i­ties in Ko­rea, the com­pa­ny told End­points News.

“This ca­pac­i­ty will be flex­i­ble de­pend­ing on GSK’s fu­ture needs and will sup­ple­ment GSK’s ex­ist­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing net­work,” the com­pa­ny wrote in a state­ment.

Em­ma Walm­s­ley GSK

Flex­i­bil­i­ty was sim­i­lar­ly the core theme in an $120 mil­lion up­grade an­nounced last Sep­tem­ber, when ex­ecs com­mit­ted to ex­pand­ing a long­time site in Up­per Meri­on, Penn­syl­va­nia.

The ma­jor­i­ty of Benlysta will still be man­u­fac­tured at Rockville, MD, one of nine US man­u­fac­tur­ing sites GSK cur­rent­ly op­er­ates and the lo­ca­tion for a new $150 mil­lion fa­cil­i­ty. Tech trans­fer to Sam­sung will start in 2020, with the first com­mer­cial sup­ply ex­pect­ed in 2022.

Ear­ly in Feb­ru­ary Bar­ron and CEO Em­ma Walm­s­ley out­lined plans for a “new GSK” in which the vac­cine unit would in­te­grate with the phar­ma group and non-core as­sets would be auc­tioned off, trig­ger­ing a round of lay­offs. Six po­ten­tial ap­provals are ex­pect­ed as Bar­ron’s 2-year cam­paign to re­verse the drug­mak­er’s lack­lus­ter de­vel­op­ment rep bears fruit.

Flagship Pioneering has a fresh company out this week, one that aims to lay the groundwork for a whole new discipline.

Senda Biosciences launched Wednesday with $88 million in Flagship cash. The goal? Gain insights into the molecular connections between people and coevolved nonhuman species like plants and bacteria, paving the way for “Intersystems Biology.”

Guillaume Pfefer has been tapped to run the show, a 25-year biotech veteran who comes from GSK after leading the development of the company’s shingles vaccine.

Bristol Myers Squibb is turning to one of the star upstarts in the machine learning world to go back to the drawing board and come up with the disease models needed to find drugs that can work against two of the toughest targets in the neuro world.

Daphne Koller’s well-funded insitro is getting $70 million in cash and near-term milestones to use their machine learning platform to create induced pluripotent stem cell-derived disease models for ALS and frontotemporal dementia.

Two days after Eli Lilly conceded that its antibody bamlanivimab was a flop in hospitalized Covid-19 patients, the US government is preparing to make it a blockbuster.

The pharma giant reported early Wednesday that it struck a deal to supply the feds with 300,000 vials of the drug at a cost of $375 million — once it gets an EUA stamp from the FDA. And once that 2-month supply deal is done, the government has an option on another 650,000 doses on the same terms — which could potentially add another $812 million.

For AstraZeneca, the PACIFIC trial in Stage III non-small cell lung cancer remains one of the big triumphs for AstraZeneca’s oncology R&D group. It not only made their PD-L1 Imfinzi a franchise player with a solid advance in a large niche of the lung cancer market, the study — which continues to offer data on the long-range efficacy of their drug — also helped salve the vicious sting of the failure of the CTLA-4 combo in the MYSTIC study.

For a company that launched in the early months of the pandemic, Q32 Bio had its fair share of run-ins with the new normals under Covid-19.

The original plan, for instance, was to conduct first-in-human studies of the IL-7 receptor antibody it licensed from Bristol Myers Squibb in the Netherlands. But they realized shortly after that while the country was beginning to open up clinical trials, there were additional restrictions on drugs that tampered with immunological mechanisms.