Con­tract re­search and man­u­fac­tur­ing has been run­ning at a rapid clip amid the pan­dem­ic, and big play­ers in the space have looked to lever­age run­away cash flow to tur­bocharge their busi­ness. For CRO Charles Riv­er Lab­o­ra­to­ries, that means more of every­thing — in­clud­ing a big in­fu­sion in­to its man­u­fac­tur­ing arm.

In mid-May, the com­pa­ny paid $292.5 mil­lion for Vi­gene Bio­sciences and its 52,000 square feet of man­u­fac­tur­ing space in Rockville, MD. In Feb­ru­ary, the com­pa­ny bought Cog­nate and pledged to dou­ble ca­pac­i­ty in Mem­phis and Eu­rope. In ear­ly April, it teamed up with Va­lence Dis­cov­ery to ex­pand its AI plat­form for mol­e­c­u­lar prop­er­ty pre­dic­tion.

Bir­git Gir­shick has been with Charles Riv­er for more than 32 years, and is now the EVP of dis­cov­ery and safe­ty as­sess­ment. She joined the com­pa­ny’s Ger­many of­fice in 1989, where she held a num­ber of roles, in­clud­ing some ad­min­is­tra­tive du­ties. She an­swered ques­tions about the com­pa­ny’s growth and the game plan it’s laid out.

Charles Riv­er Lab­o­ra­to­ries has made a flur­ry of moves in 2021. What are some of the things the com­pa­ny is look­ing for when scout­ing pos­si­ble ac­qui­si­tions? 

Our guid­ing prin­ci­ple for ac­qui­si­tions is to ac­quire com­pa­nies with the best sci­ence and the best peo­ple. This is how we en­hance the breadth and qual­i­ty of our ser­vices as we grow.

Our M&A strat­e­gy is built with the client and pa­tient at the fore­front. We reg­u­lar­ly con­fer with our clients to un­der­stand what is of the ut­most im­por­tance to the suc­cess of their pro­grams. We al­so con­tin­ue to work with them to en­sure that an ac­qui­si­tion not on­ly bol­sters our com­pre­hen­sive port­fo­lio, but is high qual­i­ty and that the tech­nol­o­gy is rel­e­vant.

The cell and gene ther­a­py land­scape is chang­ing fast. How does a com­pa­ny nav­i­gate a sec­tor that is chang­ing so rapid­ly?

We are in­vest­ing or­gan­i­cal­ly, through M&A and part­ner­ships, to ob­tain ac­cess to new tech­nolo­gies and ex­per­tise to fur­ther ac­cel­er­ate path­ways to “go” or “no go” de­ci­sions for our clients. Just re­cent­ly, for ex­am­ple, we ac­quired Ret­ro­genix.

Ret­ro­genix is an ear­ly-stage CRO pro­vid­ing spe­cial­ized bio­an­a­lyt­i­cal ser­vices uti­liz­ing its pro­pri­etary cell mi­croar­ray tech­nol­o­gy. This tech­nol­o­gy is used for tar­get re­cep­tor iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, off-tar­get pro­fil­ing, and tar­get de­con­vo­lu­tion on a wide range of nov­el ther­a­peu­tics in­clud­ing bi­o­log­ics, cell ther­a­pies, and small mol­e­cules. It is al­so a pre­mier plat­form for off-tar­get screen­ing for pre­clin­i­cal safe­ty as­sur­ance in CAR-T ther­a­pies, pro­vid­ing our clients an­oth­er ser­vice in their com­plex C&GT de­vel­op­ment ef­forts.

Our strat­e­gy is an in­te­gral part of en­sur­ing we are the pre­ferred part­ner for C&GT in­no­va­tors world­wide. For ex­am­ple, we had a long­stand­ing part­ner­ship with Dis­trib­uted Bio, which led to our ac­qui­si­tion of them ear­li­er this year. Dis­trib­uted Bio is a next-gen­er­a­tion an­ti­body dis­cov­ery com­pa­ny … By com­bin­ing Dis­trib­uted Bio’s an­ti­body li­braries and im­muno-en­gi­neer­ing plat­form with Charles Riv­er’s ex­ten­sive drug dis­cov­ery and non-clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment ex­per­tise to cre­ate an in­te­grat­ed, end-to-end plat­form for ther­a­peu­tic an­ti­body and cell and gene ther­a­py dis­cov­ery and de­vel­op­ment.

Ob­vi­ous­ly, cell and gene ther­a­py have been the fo­cus of many of the lat­est deals Charles Riv­er has been a part of. Can you talk about what goes in­to the con­ver­sa­tion, when mem­bers of your team sit down and say “we’re go­ing to put mon­ey to­ward this?” What is that con­ver­sa­tion like? Is it all at once, or grad­ual?

Our process is well thought out and ex­ten­sive — our an­nu­al strate­gic plan­ning process takes a deep dive in­to all ex­ist­ing and new modal­i­ties, tech­nolo­gies, and mar­kets.

Cell and gene ther­a­pies now make up around 11% of the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal pipeline with about 2/3 of the R&D pro­grams cur­rent­ly in the pre­clin­i­cal phase. In 2020 alone, we have con­duct­ed over 900 stud­ies, dri­ving and deep­en­ing our ex­per­tise in this field. Due to this rapid growth and ad­vance­ment, we rec­og­nized our clients’ need for ex­per­tise and ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

As a part of our client jour­ney, we reg­u­lar­ly con­sult with our clients about their needs and tech­nolo­gies that would help them to be suc­cess­ful. We al­so use part­ner­ships to find and test dri­ve new tech­nolo­gies to en­sure we’re al­ways be­com­ing eas­i­er to work with and build­ing up­on our best-in-class sci­ence.

How has the pan­dem­ic af­fect­ed op­er­a­tions? 

Charles Riv­er has been able to re­main ful­ly op­er­a­tional across all sites by ad­her­ing to the on­go­ing safe­ty mea­sures en­act­ed at the start of the pan­dem­ic, in­clud­ing, but not lim­it­ed to: hav­ing em­ploy­ees work from home when pos­si­ble; en­hanced clean­ing pro­ce­dures; re­stric­tions on all non-es­sen­tial busi­ness trav­el; test­ing, track­ing, and con­tact trac­ing of COVID-19 cas­es; mod­i­fied em­ploy­ee work sched­ules to cre­ate “time and dis­tance” and sep­a­ra­tion of staff; as well as strict vis­i­tor poli­cies. We have al­so launched re­mote au­dits and vir­tu­al fa­cil­i­ty tours, and we are ac­tive­ly uti­liz­ing re­mote study mon­i­tor­ing to sup­port clients who are un­able to trav­el.

Our glob­al and site busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity plans are ac­tive, up to date, and help­ing our site-based op­er­a­tions, as well as as­so­ci­at­ed lo­gis­tics and sup­port, to con­tin­ue to meet our clients’ needs for planned and new projects, in­clud­ing work sup­port­ing COVID-19 re­search ef­forts.

In March, Brazil’s government signed a contract with Russia for 10 million doses of the Sputnik V vaccine. Now, the country is backing out of that agreement with its health minister citing a lapsed registration deadline as the reason why.

Brazil is battling one of the toughest outbreaks in the world. There has been a recent drop in daily cases, but the country is still seeing a seven-day average of over 45,000 infections.

The FDA is slowly but surely continuing its crackdown on drugmakers that fail to post their clinical trial results to a government database in a timely manner, this week going after Georgia-based Accuitis, which develops new treatments for skin disorders.

Although the agency has previously outlined how it may take enforcement action and assess $10,000 per day fines against companies that fail to report their results, the agency has only sent two letters of noncompliance so far, and no fines have been issued to date.

The lack of drug manufacturing in Africa has led to a need for Covid-19 vaccines, and the lack of a malaria vaccine has led to the deaths of thousands of children each year. BioNTech will now to try and take down two birds with one stone.

BioNTech is exploring possibilities to set up mRNA manufacturing facilities throughout the continent, either by partnering with other companies or through its own volition, the company announced in a press release. These facilities would have mRNA manufacturing capabilities, and will share space with technology transfer hubs that are under development by the World Health Organization that line up with the strategy created by the Africa CDC.