Thanks to 57,000 square feet of re­al es­tate in New Jer­sey and Vir­ginia, a new CD­MO arm of In­dia’s TCG Life­sciences now has a US foot­print and will use it to fo­cus on ef­fi­cient and cheap pro­duc­tion of Covid-19 re­lat­ed med­i­cines and oth­er an­tivi­ral drugs.

Called TCG GreenChem, the new man­u­fac­tur­ing sub­sidiary will op­er­ate out of 3,000 square feet of lab space in Vir­ginia Com­mon­wealth Uni­ver­si­ty’s Biotech­nol­o­gy Re­search Park and 54,000 square feet of lab and of­fice space in Prince­ton’s South Cor­po­rate Cen­ter.

The com­pa­ny will of­fer CMC ser­vices for de­vel­op­ment and clin­i­cal tri­al sup­ply, ac­cord­ing to a press re­lease. The new sub­sidiary will al­so work to “ac­cel­er­ate the tran­si­tion of drug can­di­dates” through the pipeline by uti­liz­ing what it calls con­tin­u­ous flow tech­nol­o­gy.

Swa­pan Bhat­tacharya

While Covid-19 will like­ly be the main fo­cus for GreenChem as the pan­dem­ic con­tin­ues to evolve, the com­pa­ny will al­so use its ca­pac­i­ty to de­vel­op API for oth­er drugs. In the re­lease, the com­pa­ny tout­ed its abil­i­ties to uti­lize “deep ex­per­tise in ar­eas of au­to­mat­ed catal­y­sis/re­ac­tion screen­ing, re­ac­tion op­ti­miza­tion, and con­tin­u­ous chem­istry to sup­port the needs of the big phar­ma and biotech in­dus­try.”

GreenChem will al­so work to de­vel­op nov­el process­es for med­i­cines re­lat­ed to the virus, and said it is al­ready un­der con­tract with re­search foun­da­tions and hos­pi­tals, the US gov­ern­ment and un­spec­i­fied biotech com­pa­nies.

In a state­ment, Swa­pan Bhat­tacharya, TCG Life­sciences’ man­ag­ing di­rec­tor, praised the com­pa­ny’s man­age­ment team as vi­tal­ly im­por­tant to the new com­pa­ny’s goals.

“The pri­or­i­ty of our cus­tomers to­day is to find ways to lever­age their ex­ter­nal part­ners to fill up a large part of their prod­uct de­vel­op­ment needs,” Bhat­tacharya said. “In or­der to be­come their pre­ferred part­ners, we need to pro­vide high qual­i­ty, ef­fi­cient and low-cost ser­vices which are on­ly pos­si­ble if we de­ploy high-end tal­ents and skills that can dri­ve in­no­va­tion.”

Both TCG Life­sciences and TCG GreenChem are fund­ed by The Chat­ter­jee Group, a pri­vate eq­ui­ty firm that has its hooks in biotech, biotech re­al es­tate, petro­chem­i­cal, IT and aca­d­e­m­ic re­search out­lets.

The In­di­an CD­MO is a late en­try to the race for a Covid-19 man­u­fac­tur­ing re­sponse state­side. With the fi­nan­cial back­ing of the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion, a group of up­start CD­MOs tar­get­ing Covid-19 re­lat­ed gener­ics has earned big con­tracts from the gov­ern­ment to ped­dle their wares.

One point of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion is GreenChem’s In­di­an ori­gins. In­dia, one of the largest pro­duc­ers of API and fin­ished gener­ics shipped to the US, has be­come a tar­get for US law­mak­ers look­ing to ease the coun­try’s de­pen­dence on for­eign drugs amid the pan­dem­ic. With Trump out the door, the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion hasn’t shown the same ex­plic­it­ly na­tivist dri­ve for “on­shoring” drug sup­ply chains — an ini­tia­tive deeply un­pop­u­lar in phar­ma.

The Endpoints News team is continuing to track IPO filings for 2021, and we’ve designed a new tracker page for the effort.

Check it out here: Biopharma IPOs 2021 from Endpoints News

You’ll be able to find all the biotechs that have filed and priced so far this year, sortable by quarter and listed by newest first. As of the time of publishing on Feb. 25, there have already been 16 biotechs debuting on Nasdaq so far this year, with an additional four having filed their S-1 paperwork.

California’s Avid Bioservices now has two simultaneous expansion projects underway as the CDMO’s projections for customer demand sparked the launch this week of the second phase of building out its Myford facility.

Avid expects construction on the second phase, which will be known as its Myford South facility to take 18 to 24 months to complete at a cost of roughly $45 million to $55 million, it said in a press release.

When former President Donald J. Trump was voted out of office Nov. 2, his gung-ho effort to “onshore” drug manufacturing was left mostly up in the air. Joe Biden has been mostly mum on whether he would continue that effort, but a new executive order could provide a clue — at least in a few months.

In an order signed Wednesday, Biden demanded a 100-day governmental review of key supply chains, including for active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) used in American drugs.

S&P Global has taken a look at the dominant forces shaping the pharma market and come to the conclusion that there will be more downgrades than upgrades in 2021 — the 8th straight year of steady decline.

But it’s not all bad news. Some things are looking up, and there’s still plenty of money to be made in an industry that enjoys a 30% to 40% profit margin, once you factor in steep R&D expenses.

The pandemic has given a huge edge to any country that can produce vaccine in its borders. Now one vaccine biotech is looking to make sure their country has that edge for any future pandemic.

Arguing Covid-19 exposed the Netherlands’ “vulnerability,” Dutch vaccines company Intravacc recently announced that its new “modern pilot production plant” will soon be functional and that it’s spearheading a conglomerate designing a multipurpose vaccine production plant.