The CD­MO gi­ant Sam­sung Bi­o­log­ics will be start­ing the con­struc­tion of its man­u­fac­tur­ing plant at the Song­do site in South Ko­rea.

Sam­sung an­nounced to­day that it will in­vest over $1.5 bil­lion in the new fa­cil­i­ty. The CD­MO plans to break ground on the plant some­time in the first half of 2023, with it ful­ly op­er­a­tional by 2025.

The new plant, dubbed Plant 5, will al­so be the first piece to Sam­sung Bi­o­log­ic’s new Bio Cam­pus, known as Bio Cam­pus II. The fa­cil­i­ty will be 96,000 square me­ters or around 1,033,335 square feet and will be able to have a ca­pac­i­ty of 180,000 liters of prod­uct. Once Plant 5 is com­plete, this will bring the CD­MO’s man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pac­i­ty to a to­tal of 784,000 liters of prod­uct.

John Rim, the pres­i­dent and CEO of Sam­sung Bi­o­log­ics said in a re­lease:

Giv­en the con­tin­u­ing in­crease in the de­mand for out­sourced man­u­fac­tur­ing of bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, we are proac­tive­ly mak­ing this in­vest­ment in align­ment with our growth strat­e­gy to fur­ther strength­en our stand­ing as a lead­ing CD­MO. The new fa­cil­i­ty will en­able us to pro­vide our cus­tomers with even greater in­no­va­tion and ser­vices that will in­crease speed to mar­ket and flex­i­bil­i­ty.

Sam­sung’s new cam­pus is ad­ja­cent to its cur­rent fa­cil­i­ties and plants in the Song­do In­dus­tri­al clus­ter, with the com­pa­ny pur­chas­ing 360,000 square me­ters last sum­mer. It will al­so be in­vest­ing about $5.7 bil­lion in­to the new cam­pus as well.

The com­pa­ny’s fourth plant start­ed op­er­a­tions in Oc­to­ber of last year — with a plan to start full op­er­a­tions by the mid­dle of this year.

In Sam­sung Bi­o­log­ics’ year­ly re­sults, it an­nounced it will be build­ing out a stronger pres­ence in the US by open­ing sev­er­al of­fices on both coasts. One of those of­fices will open next week in New Jer­sey.

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.