New York City is in­vest­ing $20 mil­lion in biotech this year in the form of a 50,000-square-foot “in­no­va­tion space” at the Brook­lyn Navy Yard, com­plete with of­fices, re­search lab­o­ra­to­ries and events and pro­gram­ming space to grow biotech star­tups and com­pa­nies.

May­or Er­ic Adams said dur­ing his State of The City Ad­dress last Thurs­day that there will be an “em­pha­sis” on mak­ing more op­por­tu­ni­ties for women and peo­ple of col­or to fur­ther di­ver­si­fy the in­dus­try. The City first re­port­ed the news.

“We will start by open­ing a first-in-the-na­tion in­cu­ba­tor at the Brook­lyn Navy Yard, where biotech star­tups will trans­form the way we eat, build, and pro­tect our en­vi­ron­ment,” Adams said dur­ing his State of the City ad­dress. “And as we work to cre­ate more jobs, we will al­so help New York­ers train for the jobs that are in high de­mand right now – jobs in tech, re­new­able en­er­gy, and nurs­ing.”

Ma­te­ri­als star­tups hop­ing to get a leg up in New York City will al­so get a boost. Adams said the New York City Eco­nom­ic De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion would re­lease a re­quest for ex­pres­sions of in­ter­est in the search for an op­er­a­tor to open a sep­a­rate space with a lab and a busi­ness ac­cel­er­a­tor pro­gram fo­cused sole­ly on ear­ly-stage ma­te­ri­als sci­ence com­pa­nies.

Po­ten­tial lead­ers of the hub will be asked to ex­plain how they will both part­ner with al­ready-ex­ist­ing com­pa­nies and build a di­verse work­force, ac­cord­ing to a draft pro­pos­al re­viewed by The City.

The $20 mil­lion is just a small piece of the $1 bil­lion that for­mer may­or Bill de Bla­sio com­mit­ted to the LifeSci NYC ini­tia­tive launched in June of 2021, The City re­port­ed. Oth­er part­ners in the project in­clude the city’s Eco­nom­ic De­vel­op­ment Corp, Em­pire State De­vel­op­ment, the Brook­lyn Navy Yard De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion, the Part­ner­ship Fund for New York City and Newlab.

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.

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.

Belgian biotech Confo Therapeutics has landed $183 million, plus potential royalties, in a drug-discovery deal with Daiichi Sankyo.

Early Thursday, Confo Therapeutics put out word of the deal that will be focused on small molecule antagonists to go after an undisclosed target that the company says is associated with CNS diseases.

Confo CEO Cedric Ververken told Endpoints News that Daiichi originally reached out to learn about the biotech’s technology. He added that Confo, founded in 2015, will use its platform to drug a GPCR target that Daiichi has struggled with internally.

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.