Boost­ed by a gang­busters year for Rockville-based Emer­gent BioSo­lu­tions and its vi­ral vec­tors for Covid-19 vac­cines, the state of Mary­land has con­tin­ued to ce­ment its place as a hotbed for next-gen man­u­fac­tur­ing. Now, a small­er play­er is look­ing to build out its own small foothold in the state.

Vi­gene Bio­sciences, al­so based in Rockville, has snagged a pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship with the state of Mary­land and its home base of Mont­gomery Coun­ty to add 52,000 feet of man­u­fac­tur­ing space at its head­quar­ters site.

The state’s com­merce de­part­ment ap­proved a $1.225 mil­lion loan to Vi­gene that’s con­tin­gent on “job cre­ation and cap­i­tal in­vest­ment,” ac­cord­ing to a re­lease. Vi­gene es­ti­mates the ad­di­tion will bring on 245 new jobs by the end of 2025 in ad­di­tion to keep­ing the com­pa­ny’s cur­rent staff of 125 em­ploy­ees.

Al­so, Mary­land state ap­proved a $100,000 train­ing grant pro­gram for the com­pa­ny, while Mont­gomery Coun­ty ap­proved a $125,000 grant al­so con­tin­gent on job cre­ation and cap­i­tal in­vest­ment.

The new space will help sup­port the com­pa­ny’s 4,000 clients, Vi­gene said, in­clud­ing Gaithers­burg, Mary­land-based Al­tim­mune and its sin­gle-dose in­tranasal Covid-19 vac­cine.

The agree­ment with Al­tim­mune came in Ju­ly, and de­tails were rel­a­tive­ly scarce. Al­tim­mune said at the time it hoped to pro­duce at least 100 mil­lion dos­es of its vac­cine in 2021 and was con­sult­ing with oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers in ad­di­tion to Vi­gene.

Found­ed in 2012, Vi­gene fo­cus­es not on­ly on gene ther­a­py, but ways to make it af­ford­able, specif­i­cal­ly for those with can­cer and a se­ries of ge­net­ic dis­or­ders. Its most no­table progress of late in that ef­fort came in Feb­ru­ary 2020, when it was grant­ed a patent for new tech­nol­o­gy called “helper vec­tors”.

Those vec­tors, the com­pa­ny said at the time, can in­crease the pro­duc­tion of re­com­bi­nant­ly-mod­i­fied ade­no-as­so­ci­at­ed virus­es which in turn makes their out­put cheap­er since the yield is three-to-five-times high­er.

As for Emer­gent BioSo­lu­tions, they inked an ini­tial $628 mil­lion deal in June with the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s Op­er­a­tion Warp Speed to pro­duce Covid-19 vac­cines for John­son & John­son, No­vavax and Vaxart, and has con­tin­ued to ex­pand its im­pact in fight­ing the res­pi­ra­to­ry virus.

The com­pa­ny now has over half a dozen CD­MO con­tracts for vac­cines and an­ti­body hope­fuls, which now most no­tably fo­cus on the J&J and As­traZeneca vac­cines, plus a late-stage Hu­mani­gen an­ti­body ther­a­peu­tic.

Zairen Sun, Vi­gene CEO

The Endpoints News team is continuing to track IPO filings for 2021, and we’ve designed a new tracker page for the effort.

Check it out here: Biopharma IPOs 2021 from Endpoints News

You’ll be able to find all the biotechs that have filed and priced so far this year, sortable by quarter and listed by newest first. As of the time of publishing on Feb. 25, there have already been 16 biotechs debuting on Nasdaq so far this year, with an additional four having filed their S-1 paperwork.

California’s Avid Bioservices now has two simultaneous expansion projects underway as the CDMO’s projections for customer demand sparked the launch this week of the second phase of building out its Myford facility.

Avid expects construction on the second phase, which will be known as its Myford South facility to take 18 to 24 months to complete at a cost of roughly $45 million to $55 million, it said in a press release.

When former President Donald J. Trump was voted out of office Nov. 2, his gung-ho effort to “onshore” drug manufacturing was left mostly up in the air. Joe Biden has been mostly mum on whether he would continue that effort, but a new executive order could provide a clue — at least in a few months.

In an order signed Wednesday, Biden demanded a 100-day governmental review of key supply chains, including for active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) used in American drugs.

S&P Global has taken a look at the dominant forces shaping the pharma market and come to the conclusion that there will be more downgrades than upgrades in 2021 — the 8th straight year of steady decline.

But it’s not all bad news. Some things are looking up, and there’s still plenty of money to be made in an industry that enjoys a 30% to 40% profit margin, once you factor in steep R&D expenses.

The pandemic has given a huge edge to any country that can produce vaccine in its borders. Now one vaccine biotech is looking to make sure their country has that edge for any future pandemic.

Arguing Covid-19 exposed the Netherlands’ “vulnerability,” Dutch vaccines company Intravacc recently announced that its new “modern pilot production plant” will soon be functional and that it’s spearheading a conglomerate designing a multipurpose vaccine production plant.