In a big year for con­tract man­u­fac­tur­ers, Mass­a­chu­setts’ Ther­mo Fish­er Sci­en­tif­ic has emerged as a lead­ing part­ner for drug­mak­ers fight­ing the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, par­tic­u­lar­ly in di­ag­nos­tics and ther­a­peu­tics. Now, buoyed by that suc­cess and look­ing to scale up its vac­cine of­fer­ings, Ther­mo Fish­er is plot­ting big ex­pan­sion across its glob­al port­fo­lio.

Ther­mo Fish­er will ex­pand its fa­cil­i­ties in Greenville, NC; Fer­enti­no and Mon­za, Italy; and Swin­don, Eng­land, to ex­pand its range of of­fer­ings for cus­tomers”whether it’s an emerg­ing biotech work­ing on a vac­cine for a nov­el virus or a high-vol­ume phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal man­u­fac­tur­er de­liv­er­ing nec­es­sary med­i­cines at scale,” a spokesper­son told End­points News.

Ther­mo is keep­ing the cap­i­tal out­lay for the projects un­der wraps, but here’s more about each site’s ex­pan­sion:

Greenville, NC: A new, stand­alone 130,000-square-foot build­ing which com­pris­es two live-virus fill­ing lines (op­er­a­tional in 2022), and sev­en oth­er new lines in­clud­ing com­mer­cial-scale liq­uid fill­ing lines and a de­vel­op­ment line for liq­uid and lyophilized drug prod­ucts and sy­ringes (op­er­a­tional in 2021).

Fer­enti­no, Italy: A 28,000-square-foot de­vel­op­ment build­ing will of­fer new ca­pac­i­ty for one flex­i­ble line of de­vel­op­ment projects and small-scale com­mer­cial man­u­fac­tur­ing (op­er­a­tional in 2022), with the space to add fu­ture ca­pa­bil­i­ties. The site will al­so add on a new high-ca­pac­i­ty com­mer­cial liq­uid fill­ing line that will be op­er­a­tional in 2021.

Mon­za, Italy: This site will ex­pand its ster­ile fill-fin­ish line ca­pac­i­ty, with three new lines ex­pect­ed to be op­er­a­tional in 2021, in­clud­ing one high-ca­pac­i­ty line for liq­uid and lyophilized fill­ing, one pre-filled sy­ringe/pre-filled car­tridge line for medi­um batch pro­duc­tion and one flex­i­ble mul­ti-pur­pose line for low vol­ume fill­ing of vials, pre-filled sy­ringes and pre-filled car­tridges in nest and tub con­fig­u­ra­tions.

Swin­don, Eng­land: The Swin­don ex­pan­sion will ac­tu­al­ly re­vamp the ex­ist­ing 30,000-square-foot site in­to a new, full-scale com­mer­cial man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty, the spokesper­son said. The site, which will be op­er­a­tional in 2021, will add one pro­duc­tion line for liq­uid and one line for lyophilized — in ad­di­tion to “ex­ten­sive” cold-chain stor­age for vac­cines that re­quire ul­tra-low tem­per­a­tures.

The ex­pan­sions make clear the ever-grow­ing need for vi­able and ster­ile vac­cine pro­duc­tion, even out­side of the cur­rent break­neck ef­forts to pro­duce a Covid-19 vac­cine. Ther­mo Fish­er has wad­ed in­to that race as well, agree­ing in Sep­tem­ber to pro­duce In­ovio’s Covid-19 vac­cine (INO-4800) be­gin­ning in 2021.

Al­so on the Covid-19 front, Ther­mo Fish­er in May en­tered in­to a deal with Cal­i­for­nia-based Hu­mani­gen to help scale up man­u­fac­tur­ing of the biotech’s lenl­izum­ab, a clin­i­cal-stage can­di­date for cy­tokine storms that the com­pa­ny is test­ing in pa­tients with more se­vere cas­es of the res­pi­ra­to­ry virus. In Sep­tem­ber, Ther­mo Fish­er agreed to a deal with the US gov­ern­ment to pro­duce the vi­ral trans­port me­dia tubes need­ed to trans­port Covid-19 test sam­ples.

Pri­or to the four ex­pan­sion sites an­nounced this week, the com­pa­ny al­so an­nounced re­cent­ly an ex­pan­sion in Sin­ga­pore that in­cludes a high-speed ster­ile line for live-virus fill­ing. Ther­mo Fish­er al­so agreed to a joint ven­ture with In­no­force to build a new phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal ser­vices fa­cil­i­ty in Hangzhou, Chi­na that fo­cus­es on in­te­grat­ed bi­o­log­ics drug sub­stance and ster­ile drug prod­uct de­vel­op­ment and man­u­fac­tur­ing.

Both of those sites are ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed in 2022.

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.

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.

Longtime Vertex CEO Jeffrey Leiden is taking on a new role.

Leiden has been appointed chairman of Tmunity’s board of directors, the company announced Monday. The move comes about a year and a half after Leiden announced he’d be stepping down from his position at Vertex.

Vertex saw immense growth under Leiden, leading the company from its exit out of hepatitis C, when cures were moving in, and into cystic fibrosis. The company’s cystic fibrosis triple combo therapy Trikafta is already its best-seller, reaching the distinction just six weeks after launch and recording the strongest first quarter of sales for any drug, per some estimates.