Once thought un­like­ly as a mech­a­nism of ac­tion in vac­cines, mR­NA-based shots have stormed out to a lead in the fight against Covid-19. But mR­NA’s po­ten­tial ef­fect isn’t lim­it­ed to just vac­cines, and now Ger­man drug­mak­er Mer­ck KGaA is look­ing to find out just how far it can take the tech­nol­o­gy.

The Darm­stadt, Ger­many based bio­phar­ma has ac­quired mR­NA CD­MO AmpTec in Ham­burg, say­ing it plans to strength­en its own ca­pac­i­ties to de­vel­op and man­u­fac­ture mR­NA for cus­tomers to use in “vac­cines, treat­ments and di­ag­nos­tics ap­plic­a­ble in Covid-19 and many oth­er dis­eases.”

Fi­nan­cial terms of the agree­ment weren’t dis­closed.

Ste­fan Os­chmann

In a state­ment, Mer­ck KGaA CEO Ste­fan Os­chmann said the promise shown for mR­NA’s use in Pfiz­er and Mod­er­na’s Covid-19 vac­cines piqued the com­pa­ny’s in­ter­est in snap­ping up AmpTec.

“By com­bin­ing AmpTec’s PCR-based mR­NA tech­nol­o­gy with our ex­ten­sive ex­per­tise in lipids man­u­fac­tur­ing, we are able to pro­vide a tru­ly dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed and in­te­grat­ed of­fer­ing across the mR­NA val­ue chain, which will sig­nif­i­cant­ly de­crease sup­ply chain com­plex­i­ty and en­hance speed-to-mar­ket,” Os­chmann said.

AmpTec al­so boasts a di­ag­nos­tics busi­ness that fo­cus­es on pro­duc­ing “cus­tomized long RNAs and DNAs for in vit­ro di­ag­nos­tics,” which will fur­ther com­ple­ment a key com­po­nent of Mer­ck KGaA’s ex­ist­ing ser­vices. All told, the com­pa­ny said it aims to scale up both at AmpTec’s Ham­burg and at the Mer­ck KGaA glob­al head­quar­ters in Darm­stadt.

The ac­qui­si­tion con­tin­ues some re­cent and sub­stan­tive ex­pan­sion plays by Mer­ck KGaA, which an­nounced in De­cem­ber that it agreed to a three-year-deal with Ar­tios worth $30 mil­lion up­front and an­oth­er $865 mil­lion wait­ing in the wings, to dis­cov­er and de­vel­op small mol­e­cule can­cer drugs that tar­get DNA re­pair en­zymes.

Mer­ck KGaA made waves in Sep­tem­ber af­ter it named Belén Gar­i­jo as its new chief ex­ec­u­tive, mak­ing her one of on­ly two women CEOs at Big Phar­ma com­pa­nies. Gar­i­jo will suc­ceed Os­chmann when his tenure ends by the close of April.

In 2019, GSK paid up to $4.2 bil­lion for Mer­ck KGaA’s bi­func­tion­al fu­sion pro­tein-based can­cer im­munother­a­py, bin­tra­fusp al­fa, as the com­pa­ny be­gan a for­ay in­to on­col­o­gy in ad­di­tion to its mR­NA ser­vices.

Al­so of note, in 2017, End­points News re­port­ed, Mer­ck bought four DNA dam­age re­sponse mol­e­cules from Ver­tex for $230 mil­lion. That in­clud­ed two ATR in­hibitors that are now in the clin­ic for their ef­fi­ca­cy in treat­ing sol­id can­cer tu­mors.

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.