An­ti-ag­ing com­pa­ny Hu­man Longevi­ty, found­ed by pi­o­neer­ing ge­nom­ic re­searcher Craig Ven­ter, is one step clos­er, po­ten­tial­ly, to be­com­ing a pub­lic com­pa­ny.

The start­up put out a press re­lease Mon­day af­ter­noon say­ing it has signed a “let­ter of in­tent” to re­verse merge with a SPAC run by for­mer Cred­it Su­isse CEO Tid­jane Thi­am, known as Free­dom Ac­qui­si­tion I Corp. If none of the SPAC in­vestors re­deem their shares and pull out at the float price of $10, Hu­man Longevi­ty will re­ceive $345 mil­lion.

Ven­ter’s for­mer com­pa­ny made sure to em­pha­size that Mon­day’s an­nounce­ment was far from a done deal, how­ev­er. Hu­man Longevi­ty made sev­er­al men­tions in its re­lease that there is no “as­sur­ance” the deal will go through. The en­ti­ties al­so did not file an SEC re­port, typ­i­cal­ly the stan­dard when an­nounc­ing a SPAC deal.

If the merg­er does take place, it will like­ly oc­cur in the third quar­ter this year and close in the first quar­ter of 2023, the com­pa­nies said. There was no in­for­ma­tion on a po­ten­tial PIPE fi­nanc­ing.

The Fi­nan­cial Times was the first to re­port that Ven­ter and Thi­am’s com­pa­nies were in SPAC merg­er dis­cus­sions.

Hu­man Longevi­ty got start­ed back in 2013 and of­fers ge­nom­ic se­quenc­ing and blood tests to clients, of­fer­ing per­son­al­ized meth­ods to fight ag­ing-re­lat­ed dis­eases. The com­pa­ny soon found it­self in a tu­mul­tuous pe­ri­od as Ven­ter was ac­cused of steal­ing trade se­crets as part of back-and-forth law­suits in 2018.

Though the com­pa­ny is seek­ing to raise $345 mil­lion through the re­verse-merg­er dance to Nas­daq, there’s no guar­an­tee it will do so giv­en the cur­rent mar­ket con­di­tions. Be­cause SPAC in­vestors don’t know the merg­er tar­get when they sign up, some re­tain the op­tion to take their mon­ey back out, with in­ter­est, at the SPAC’s IPO price — known as re­deem­ing shares.

With SPAC ac­tiv­i­ty falling from the pan­dem­ic-fu­eled boom of late 2020 and ear­ly 2021, Thi­am’s blank check com­pa­ny may see in­vestors re­deem their shares. Such a move would ring fa­mil­iar with the Sen­ti Bio SPAC con­sum­mat­ed ear­li­er this month, when the Tim Lu-run biotech net­ted on­ly $84.5 mil­lion of the $230 mil­lion avail­able in the SPAC trust, and $140.3 mil­lion over­all.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, Free­dom Ac­qui­si­tion I Corp. has strug­gled to re­tain spon­sors, re­veal­ing in an SEC fil­ing this month that Pim­co, the world’s largest bond man­ag­er, gave up its SPAC stake. Pim­co was re­placed by an ad­vi­so­ry firm, Next G, af­fil­i­at­ed with Chi­nese en­tre­pre­neur Ed­ward Zeng.

Lonza has been expanding its reach across the globe, bringing sites in China and the US online this year, but now they are looking closer to home for their next major investment.

The Swiss manufacturer on Friday announced plans to construct a large-scale commercial drug fill and finish facility in the town of Stein, Switzerland. The new facility will be delivered through an investment of approximately CHF 500 million, or $519 million, and is expected to be completed in 2026. The facility will also be constructed on the same campus as Lonza’s current clinical drug product facility.

Fujifilm’s spending spree into its CDMO arm is not slowing down.

The multinational announced on Wednesday that it will invest $1.6 billion to enhance and expand the cell culture manufacturing services of the CDMO arm of the Japanese conglomerate Fujifilm Diosynth.

The investment will enhance Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies’ sites in Hillerød, Denmark, and College Station, TX. The investment is expected to create approximately 450 jobs across both facilities.