The South Ko­re­an chem­i­cal and life sci­ence pro­duc­er LG Chem has roped in a mul­ti­mil­lion-dol­lar con­tract to pro­duce its po­lio vac­cine.

LG Chem has se­cured a man­u­fac­tur­ing con­tract worth $200 mil­lion for UNICEF to pro­duce its po­lio vac­cine called Eu­po­lio and the pen­tava­lent vac­cine Eu­pen­ta, which is de­signed to pre­vent diph­the­ria, tetanus, he­pati­tis B, menin­gi­tis and per­tus­sis.

LG Chem will pro­duce $100 mil­lion-worth of its po­lio vac­cine for two years, from 2024 through 2025. The con­tract for Eu­pen­ta will pro­duce $100 mil­lion-worth of the vac­cine for the next five years, start­ing this year through 2027. While no ex­act pro­duc­tion amounts were giv­en, LG Chem stat­ed in its re­lease that it will be sup­ply­ing vac­cines for around 80 mil­lion chil­dren glob­al­ly.

“We were able to win a large-scale or­der from UNICEF based on the UN agency’s strong trust in LG Chem’s vac­cine de­vel­op­ment and sup­ply ca­pa­bil­i­ties,” said Park Heui-sul, the head of LG Chems’ spe­cial­ty care busi­ness unit, in a re­lease.

Eu­po­lio re­ceived pre­qual­i­fi­ca­tion from the WHO in 2020, and Eu­pen­ta net­ted one in 2016. The po­lio vac­cine is the first Sabin-IPV to net WHO pre­qual­i­fi­ca­tion, and ac­cord­ing to an LG Chem re­lease, the vac­cine us­es Sabin po­liovirus strains which can lead to a low­er biosafe­ty risk com­pared to wild-type po­liovirus­es. LG Chem be­gan the de­vel­op­ment of the vac­cine in 2014 and in­vest­ed in con­struct­ing a man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty for it in Os­ong, South Ko­rea.

LG Chem has al­so been mak­ing strides in the M&A game as of late, tak­ing Aveo On­col­o­gy pri­vate in a $566 mil­lion all-cash deal last Oc­to­ber, which gave the South Ko­re­an man­u­fac­tur­er a com­mer­cial foot­print in the US.

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.

In a first, Merck has secured a full approval for Keytruda in a tumor agnostic setting — as a treatment for any unresectable or metastatic solid tumors that are classified as microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) or mismatch repair deficient (dMMR).

The FDA granted Keytruda accelerated approval in this indication in 2017, and GSK’s Jemperli followed suit in 2021. But now it’s converted to a full approval for Keytruda. Before prescribing, doctors would have to make sure patients carry this biomarker, using an FDA-approved test.

When Vigil Neuroscience filed its IPO papers in late 2021, the biotech revealed that the FDA had just cleared its Phase I trial — but with a partial clinical hold that limited dosing to under a certain level.

More than a year later, the FDA has lifted the hold.

Vigil is now free to dose VGL101, an antibody targeting TREM2, at levels higher than 20 mg/kg in its ongoing and future clinical trials in patients with adult-onset leukoencephalopathy with axonal spheroids and pigmented glia (ALSP), an inherited condition that affects the brain and spinal cord.