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.

The area of Ireland famous for Blarney Castle and its cliffsides along the Atlantic Ocean is seeing Merck KGaA expand its commitment there.

The German drug manufacturer is expanding its membrane and filtration manufacturing capabilities in Ireland. The company will invest approximately €440 million ($470 million) to increase membrane manufacturing capacity in Carrigtwohill, Ireland, and build a new manufacturing facility at Blarney Business Park, in County Cork, Ireland.

As the cases of monkeypox now sit at well over 100 worldwide and have spread to multiple continents, the orders for any type of vaccine against monkeypox are seeing nations and medical bodies looking to get their hands on anything and everything. And now SIGA Technologies seems to be getting in on the action.

According to Euronews, SIGA Technologies, a pharmaceutical company that is focused on providing medical countermeasures to biological and chemical attacks, is now in talks with several European authorities looking to stockpile its antiviral that can counter monkeypox. The drug known as tecovirimat or Tpoxx was approved by the FDA in 2018 as a vaccine for smallpox but was approved by the European Medicines Agency to also act against monkeypox, cowpox and complications from immunization with vaccinia.

Pfizer has agreed to pay $290,000 to settle allegations of questionable copay coupon practices in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, and Vermont from 2014 to 2018.

While the company has not admitted any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, Pfizer has agreed to issue restitution checks to about 5,000 consumers.

A Pfizer spokesperson said the company has “enhanced its co-pay coupons to alleviate the concerns raised by states and agreed to a $30,000 payment to each.”

A judge in Delaware has ruled against Astellas Pharma and Gilead in a long-running patent case over Pfizer-onwed Hospira’s generic version of Lexiscan.

The case kicked off in 2018, after Hospira submitted an Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA) for approval to market a generic version of Gilead’s Lexiscan. The drug is used in myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI), a type of nuclear stress test.

Twenty House Democrats, including Reps. Katie Porter of California and Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, are calling on Senate leaders to move quickly with a reconciliation bill (meaning they only need a simple majority for passage) with prescription drug pricing reforms, and to include adding new authority for Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

They also called on the Senate to specifically follow suit with the House passage of a $35 per month insulin cap (as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s deadline for a vote on that provision has come and gone), and to cap Medicare Part D costs at $2,000 per year for seniors.

Two Big Pharma companies are going to the mat over genetically modified mice in a licensing dispute.

Bristol Myers Squibb is suing Novartis in New York over a dispute concerning an evaluation, research and commercialization agreement stretching back to the late ’90s initially inked between Novartis and BMS’ predecessor Medarex. The deal in question allowed Novartis to use Medarex’s patented transgenic mice to develop therapeutic drugs. Novartis agreed to pay Medarex – and subsequently BMS – a royalty on sales of drugs it developed using the mice.