A month af­ter un­veil­ing plans for a new man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty in Gene­va, KBI Bio­phar­ma has al­ready pegged the lo­ca­tion for its next site: a $150 mil­lion fa­cil­i­ty in Re­search Tri­an­gle Park, North Car­oli­na.

The 140,000-square-foot fa­cil­i­ty will be ful­ly op­er­a­tional by Q1 2022, and the con­tract ser­vices com­pa­ny says it will be home to more than 200 op­er­a­tions and qual­i­ty as­sur­ance staffers. A mys­tery part­ner is chip­ping in on the fa­cil­i­ty to man­u­fac­ture its pro­tein ther­a­pies, though KBI is keep­ing mum about who.

“Ex­pan­sion of our US-based cell cul­ture op­er­a­tions is a key in­vest­ment to sup­port our client’s com­mer­cial­iza­tion strate­gies,” KBI pres­i­dent and CEO Dirk Lange said in a state­ment.

The new site is about a five-minute dri­ve from Pa­tri­ot Park, where KBI’s mam­malian drug de­vel­op­ment labs are al­ready lo­cat­ed. The com­pa­ny says its new fa­cil­i­ty will house up to six 2,000-liter, sin­gle-use biore­ac­tor sys­tems and as­so­ci­at­ed har­vest and pu­rifi­ca­tion equip­ment, which could pump out more than 100 com­mer­cial batch­es a year. KBI tout­ed that the fa­cil­i­ty will al­so in­clude elec­tron­ic batch records, elec­tron­ic log­books, pa­per­less ma­te­ri­als man­age­ment and Lab­o­ra­to­ry In­for­ma­tion Man­age­ment Sys­tems (LIMS) for qual­i­ty con­trol da­ta man­age­ment.

“By ex­pand­ing our com­mer­cial man­u­fac­tur­ing foot­print with this fa­cil­i­ty, we are able to pro­vide our part­ners with launch ma­te­r­i­al and mar­ket sup­ply,” Lange said. “We chose to build this new fa­cil­i­ty in the Re­search Tri­an­gle Park be­cause it gives us ac­cess to high­ly-spe­cial­ized re­sources. The com­bi­na­tion of tal­ent, tech­ni­cal and aca­d­e­m­ic train­ing in this re­gion is out­stand­ing, which is crit­i­cal as we are ex­pand­ing our im­pact by serv­ing more clients and pa­tients from this new fa­cil­i­ty.”

RTP, close to three of the state’s top re­search uni­ver­si­ties, is home to a grow­ing num­ber of CD­MOs and bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies. Back in Jan­u­ary, Eli Lil­ly re­served $470 mil­lion for a new man­u­fac­tur­ing site in the area to be­gin pro­duc­tion of in­jectable prod­ucts and de­liv­ery de­vices.

More than five years after Corey Fishman and Michael Dunne dusted sulopenem off Pfizer’s shelves — the second castoff antibiotic they’ve brought out of the pharma giant — and founded Iterum Therapeutics around that single drug, they have lined up a quick shot at approval with priority review from the FDA.

The decision, six months from now, will mark a make-or-break moment for a struggling biotech that has just enough cash to keep the lights on until the third quarter.

Immunocore spent much of 2019 dealing with the fallout of the Neil Woodford scandal, as the former star investor’s fall crashed the biotech’s valuation out of unicorn range. Now it turns out that the company spent 2020 dealing with another internal scandal.

The longtime UK biotech darling disclosed in their IPO filing last week that they had fallen victim to an alleged kickback scheme involving one of their employees. After a whistleblower came forward, they said in their F-1, they spent the summer and spring investigating, finding fraud on the part of an employee and two outside vendors.

It’s not new for Lonza, the Swiss CDMO nearing its quasquicentennial anniversary, to be in the upper echelon of the biotech manufacturing industry.

But 2020 — as it was for many CDMOs — was a special year even by Lonza’s standards. The company inked a deal to produce 1 billion worldwide doses of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine and tapped pharma vet Pierre-Alain Ruffieux to lead its operations, moves which have allowed Lonza to make a myriad of other deals that will continue to ramp up its global production capacity.