Gener­ics man­u­fac­tur­er San­doz has com­mit­ted rough­ly $400 mil­lion to con­struct a new plant in Eu­rope.

San­doz has agreed to build a new bi­o­log­ics plant in the town of Len­da­va, Slove­nia, which is lo­cat­ed about 125 miles east of Slove­nia’s cap­i­tal of Ljubl­jana, near the bor­der with Hun­gary. In an email to End­points News, a spokesper­son said the plant will be used to man­u­fac­ture biosim­i­lars, but the com­pa­ny hasn’t yet de­ter­mined which ones.

As part of the terms of its pro­posed spin­off from No­var­tis, the San­doz spokesper­son said cur­rent biosim­i­lar pro­duc­tion and de­vel­op­ment will stay with No­var­tis, which will pro­vide CD­MO ser­vices to San­doz while it builds out its net­work. The spin­off is on track for the sec­ond half of this year, No­var­tis said in its lat­est quar­ter­ly re­port.

“To this end, San­doz is in­vest­ing to es­tab­lish its own biosim­i­lars man­u­fac­tur­ing and de­vel­op­ment ca­pa­bil­i­ties for the longer term, against the back­ground of rapid­ly ris­ing fu­ture de­mand for biosim­i­lars. This in­vest­ment is an im­por­tant step in this re­gard,” the spokesper­son said.

No oth­er de­tails, such as the size of the fa­cil­i­ty, have been dis­closed, but San­doz is an­tic­i­pat­ing the site will add around 300 jobs. Work on the site is ex­pect­ed to start some­time lat­er this year, with the site be­com­ing ful­ly op­er­a­tional in 2026.

San­doz has had a pres­ence in Slove­nia for 40 years, but the spokesper­son said that Len­da­va of­fers the com­pa­ny good lo­gis­ti­cal links to oth­er San­doz pro­duc­tion sites and aca­d­e­m­ic in­sti­tu­tions near­by. Ac­cord­ing to the San­doz re­lease, the new project al­so marks one of the largest in­ter­na­tion­al pri­vate sec­tor in­vest­ments in Slove­nia.

“Biosim­i­lar med­i­cines in­crease ac­cess to cut­ting-edge bi­o­log­ic ther­a­pies for the pa­tients who need them most. At San­doz, we are de­ter­mined to con­tin­ue lead­ing the way on dri­ving ac­cess to these crit­i­cal med­i­cines. This in­vest­ment un­der­scores our am­bi­tion to be the sus­tain­able glob­al leader in biosim­i­lars, a seg­ment pro­ject­ed to grow dou­ble-dig­it an­nu­al­ly over the next decade,” San­doz CEO Richard Saynor said in a re­lease.

San­doz cur­rent­ly has four lo­ca­tions and 5,000 em­ploy­ees across Slove­nia.

Microcap biotech Seelos Therapeutics is halting enrollment of its study in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (also known as Machado-Joseph disease) because of “financial considerations,” and in order to focus on other studies, the company said today, adding that the pause would be temporary.

The study will continue with the patients who have already enrolled, and the data from them will be used to decide whether to continue enrolling others in the future.

Otonomy may be shutting down, but the lessons learned there will live on at another biotech working on new treatments for hearing loss.

San Francisco-based Spiral Therapeutics has bought certain assets related to three of Otonomy’s programs, ranging from data, patent rights, and know-how to inventory. That includes data around Otonomy’s twice-failed lead program, OTO-104 (Otividex), a sustained-exposure formulation of dexamethasone.

Paul McKenzie took over as CEO of Australian pharma giant CSL this month, following in the footsteps of long-time CSL vet Paul Perreault.

With an eye on mRNA, and quickly commercializing its new, $3.5 million-per-shot gene therapy for hemophilia B, McKenzie and chief medical officer Bill Mezzanotte answered some questions from Endpoints News this afternoon about where McKenzie is going to take the company and what advances may be coming to market from CSL’s pipeline. Below is a lightly edited transcript.

The government of the United Kingdom is giving out grants to several manufacturers that have a presence in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The government announced that four companies, including Ipsen, contract manufacturer Pharmaron, DNA manufacturer Touchlight and diagnostic test producer Randox, will receive a total of £277 million ($341.1 million). According to a release from the UK government, this represents the first portion of grants from the Life Sciences Innovative Manufacturing Fund.