The Cana­di­an gov­ern­ment is look­ing to raise the pro­file of the coun­try’s na­tive biotech in­dus­try, and British Co­lum­bia’s Ab­Cellera is the lat­est com­pa­ny to ben­e­fit from the na­tion’s strate­gic in­no­va­tion fund.

Mur­ray Mc­Cutcheon

Ab­Cellera has land­ed a site in Van­cou­ver for a 130,000-square-foot fa­cil­i­ty to help bring the biotech’s an­ti­body ther­a­pies to clin­i­cal tri­als. In April, the com­pa­ny broke ground on a 380,000-square-foot head­quar­ters that will be with­in walk­ing dis­tance of the new man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty, set to be built on a va­cant two-acre site.

Mur­ray Mc­Cutcheon, the VP of cor­po­rate de­vel­op­ment, said in a call to End­points News that the nov­el­ty of the site in Cana­da, cou­pled with the nat­ur­al beau­ty and the qual­i­ty of life that comes with liv­ing in British Co­lum­bia, will be a huge draw to new em­ploy­ees.

“We’re quite for­tu­nate here on the West Coast here to have great uni­ver­si­ties and have great tal­ent, but so far, we haven’t had a very big biotech ecosys­tem, and we’re work­ing to change that,” COO Véronique Lecault said Wednes­day.

Véronique Lecault

When the pan­dem­ic un­fold­ed, Ab­Cellera was forced to piv­ot quick­ly and went from dis­cov­ery to hu­man clin­i­cal tri­als with­in 90 days for its mon­o­clon­al an­ti­body ther­a­py bam­lanivimab, which was co-de­vel­oped with Eli Lil­ly to treat pa­tients by work­ing against spike pro­tein to re­duce vi­ral repli­ca­tion.

In April though, the FDA re­voked the emer­gency use au­tho­riza­tion for bam­lanivimab when ad­min­is­tered alone, as the in­crease in vari­ants be­came re­sis­tant to the drug and led to an in­crease in treat­ment fail­ure.

Ab­Cellera has dis­cov­ered a sec­ond an­ti­body, LY-CoV1404, that it is de­vel­op­ing with Lil­ly to help ad­dress vari­ants of Covid-19. The an­ti­body en­tered clin­i­cal tri­als in May.

The fa­cil­i­ty is set to be op­er­a­tional by 2024, and will em­ploy an ad­di­tion­al 300 peo­ple over the next few years. When asked, Mc­Cutcheon said that it is not yet clear which an­ti­bod­ies will be man­u­fac­tured at the site since it is still years away from com­ple­tion.

The Cana­di­an gov­ern­ment has thrown  $125.6 mil­lion from its SIF to sup­port the work, in ad­di­tion, to of­fer pre­pared­ness for fu­ture pan­demics.

François-Philippe Cham­pagne

“Al­though the Cana­di­an an­gle is an im­por­tant piece of it, be­cause the gov­ern­ment has pro­vid­ed us an im­por­tant fund­ing com­mit­ment, as a com­pa­ny, our part­ners are glob­al, our so­lu­tions are glob­al and the bor­der is ir­rel­e­vant we will make this avail­able to every­body we work with and ul­ti­mate­ly we think it will help us bring ther­a­pies to pa­tients faster,” Mc­Cutcheon said.

Re­silience, the Bob Nelsen project aimed at the lofty goal of rewrit­ing the rules of drug man­u­fac­tur­ing, al­so re­cent­ly struck a deal with the Cana­di­an Strate­gic In­no­va­tion Fund, which gave the com­pa­ny $163 mil­lion to ex­pand mR­NA pro­duc­tion at the com­pa­ny’s Mis­sis­sauga fa­cil­i­ty. Prime Min­is­ter Justin Trudeau said in a press con­fer­ence that the move was a step to­ward build­ing fu­ture pan­dem­ic pre­pared­ness, and boost­ing its pres­ence in the life sci­ences.

“I am pleased to see Ab­Cellera par­tic­i­pat­ing in our gov­ern­ment’s ef­fort to re­verse a four-decade de­cline in Cana­da’s do­mes­tic ca­pac­i­ty,” min­is­ter of in­no­va­tion, sci­ence and in­dus­try François-Philippe Cham­pagne said. “This is an im­por­tant step to­ward im­prov­ing Cana­da’s pan­dem­ic pre­pared­ness, and a dri­ver for our eco­nom­ic re­cov­ery.”

So­cial im­age: Carl Hansen, Ab­Cellera CEO

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

FDA Commissioner Rob Califf joined the heads of the CDC and NIH in the hot seat today before a key House subcommittee, explaining that there needs to be a much faster, more coordinated way to oversee vaccine safety, and that foreign biopharma inspections, halted for years due to the pandemic, are slowly ramping up again.

Califf, who stressed to the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health that the CDC also needs better data, made clear that the FDA’s ability to monitor the safety of vaccines “would also benefit greatly by a coordinated federal public health data reporting authority.”