Ar­row­head Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals is get­ting a leg up from Wis­con­sin of­fi­cials on a new build­ing project.

The com­pa­ny has out­lined a set of in­cen­tives that have be­come quite com­mon as states look to com­pete for new man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ties and the jobs they can cre­ate.

Ar­row­head is build­ing a new drug man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty in Verona, WI, rough­ly 10 miles from Madi­son, that will have 125,000 square foot lab­o­ra­to­ry and of­fice fa­cil­i­ties to sup­port process de­vel­op­ment and an­a­lyt­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ties. It will al­so con­tain 160,000 square feet of man­u­fac­tur­ing space. Ar­row­head is no stranger to the Madi­son area as it cur­rent­ly has op­er­a­tions around in the state’s cap­i­tal.

Ar­row­head was award­ed up to $16 mil­lion in tax in­cre­ment fi­nanc­ing from the city. It will al­so re­ceive up to $2.5 mil­lion in re­fund­able Wis­con­sin state in­come tax cred­its of­fered by the Wis­con­sin Eco­nom­ic De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (WEDC). These tax ben­e­fits are be­ing of­fered as in­cen­tives for Ar­row­head to in­vest in the lo­cal area and po­ten­tial­ly cre­ate new jobs.

The com­ple­tion of the lab and of­fice space is an­tic­i­pat­ed in Q1 2023 with the man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed in Q4 2024.

The ball start­ed rolling on the project in 2021 when Ar­row­head Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals pur­chased 13 acres of land in Wis­con­sin’s Verona Tech­nol­o­gy Park. Ar­row­head is ex­pect­ed to spend be­tween $200 mil­lion and $250 mil­lion to build the fa­cil­i­ties and cre­ate an es­ti­mat­ed 250 jobs for the area.

“We have had a pro­duc­tive and mu­tu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial re­la­tion­ship with the lo­cal biotech com­mu­ni­ty and broad­er busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty in the greater Madi­son, WI area for many years,” said Christo­pher An­za­lone, Ar­row­head pres­i­dent and CEO.

On the back of the ground­break­ing, Ar­row­head’s stock $AR­WR man­aged to slight­ly in­crease, but its price is still down around 50% year to date as the biotech mar­ket con­tin­ues to face a pow­er­ful bear mar­ket.

Ac­cord­ing to Anaza­lone, the new fa­cil­i­ties will help sup­port the de­vel­op­ment and the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of new med­i­cines that lever­age the nat­ur­al RNAi path­way to tar­get genes in­volved in var­i­ous dis­eases.

For Ar­row­head, RNAi is a ma­jor fo­cus for the com­pa­ny as, in 2020, The com­pa­ny es­tab­lished a part­ner­ship with Take­da tar­get­ing al­pha-1 liv­er dis­ease, dubbed ARO-AAT. The com­pa­ny has al­so li­censed out sev­er­al drugs in its pipeline to ma­jor phar­ma com­pa­nies in­clud­ing he­pati­tis B to J&J and a drug for car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease to Am­gen, among oth­ers.

In 2021, Glax­o­SmithK­line paid $120 mil­lion in up­front cash a to de­vel­op and sell ARO-HSD, Ar­row­head Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals’ RNA in­ter­fer­ence drug tar­get­ing fat­ty liv­er NASH.

The com­pa­ny was forced to scrap its en­tire clin­i­cal pipeline in 2016 fol­low­ing deaths in a non-hu­man pri­mate tox­i­col­o­gy study. The com­pa­ny faced a sim­i­lar is­sue in Ju­ly of 2021 when it paused the Phase I/II tri­al of RNAi cys­tic fi­bro­sis drug ARO-ENaC af­ter a study in rats showed lung in­flam­ma­tion sig­nals.

German mRNA player BioNTech opened the doors to a new manufacturing facility on Thursday, this one just about 75 miles north of its headquarters in Mainz, Germany.

BioNTech announced on Thursday that it has completed the construction of its first plasmid DNA manufacturing facility in Marburg, Germany. The facility will produce materials for mRNA-based vaccines and therapies along with cell therapies.

With Novo Nordisk’s obesity treatment Wegovy fully back in stock in December, sales are beginning to soar, the Danish pharma reported during its annual earnings call on Wednesday. Total scripts of the glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) Wegovy topped 37,000 weekly in mid-January, a hockey stick uptick from end-of-year levels below 15,000 per week.

The new prescriptions come on top of the overall momentum of Novo obesity drug sales in 2022, although the then supply-constrained Wegovy was only part of that. Sibling obesity med Saxenda accounted for DKK 10.7 billion ($1.58 billion) of the total DKK 16.9 billion ($2.49 billion), or about 63%, in Novo Nordisk’s reported obesity segment sales.