As Ire­land con­tin­ues to see more in­vest­ments and build­ing projects from phar­ma com­pa­nies, an­oth­er con­tender is look­ing to place more in­vest­ment in the Emer­ald Isle.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­port from The Irish Times on Fri­day, Ab­bott Lab­o­ra­to­ries is in­vest­ing €440 mil­lion, or about $451 mil­lion, to build a new man­u­fac­tur­ing plant in Kilken­ny, lo­cat­ed in the coun­try’s south­east, to make more of its glu­cose mon­i­tors.

Ac­cord­ing to an Ab­bott spokesper­son in an email to End­points News, the com­pa­ny an­tic­i­pates that more than 800 peo­ple will be em­ployed at the Kilken­ny fa­cil­i­ty once it opens, and the re­main­der will be em­ployed at its site in Done­gal.

“Done­gal is a key man­u­fac­tur­ing site for Ab­bott’s di­a­betes care busi­ness, and we have in­vest­ed heav­i­ly in ex­pand­ing our op­er­a­tions there over the last four years. We’re in­creas­ing our cap­i­tal in­vest­ment in Done­gal in­clud­ing fa­cil­i­ties, pro­duc­tion equip­ment and adding peo­ple to en­able Done­gal to bet­ter sup­port our prod­ucts glob­al­ly,” the Ab­bott spokesper­son said.

For the new 250,000 square-foot build­ing in Kilken­ny, the com­pa­ny will start re­cruit­ment im­me­di­ate­ly for po­si­tions in en­gi­neer­ing, qual­i­ty con­trol and med­ical de­vice man­u­fac­tur­ing, among oth­ers. The site, which the com­pa­ny hopes to have on­line by 2024, will be re­spon­si­ble for the man­u­fac­ture of its Freestyle Li­bre 3 sys­tem for con­tin­u­ous glu­cose mon­i­tor­ing. And the com­pa­ny is bull­ish that it can find the tal­ent.

“The new lo­ca­tion of Kilken­ny is at­trac­tive to our fu­ture em­ploy­ees as the re­gion has strong ed­u­ca­tion­al links with the South-East Tech­no­log­i­cal Uni­ver­si­ty, en­abling us to at­tract grad­u­ates from its Wa­ter­ford and Car­low cam­pus­es,” the spokesper­son said.

Ab­bot has had a heavy pres­ence in Ire­land for over 75 years and cur­rent­ly em­ploys more than 5,000 peo­ple across nine sites. How­ev­er, Ab­bott’s fur­ther com­mit­ment comes at a time when sev­er­al oth­er ma­jor phar­mas are look­ing to snap up Irish soil for man­u­fac­tur­ing.

Mer­ck KGaA, Alex­ion, Eli Lil­ly and SK have all an­nounced ei­ther new ma­jor mul­ti­mil­lion-dol­lar sites or ex­pan­sion projects across the coun­try this year, and the news from Ab­bott shows that the speed of man­u­fac­tur­ing de­vel­op­ment isn’t slow­ing down.

Avance Clinical is the Australian CRO for international biotechs providing world-class clinical research services with FDA-accepted data across all phases. With Avance Clinical, biotech companies can leverage Australia’s supportive clinical trials environment which includes no IND requirement plus a 43.5% Government incentive rebate on clinical spend. The CRO has been delivering clinical drug development services for international biotechs for FDA and EMA regulatory approval for the past 24 years. The company has been recognized for the past two consecutive years with the prestigious Frost & Sullivan CRO Best Practices Award and a finalist in Informa Pharma’s Best CRO award for 2022.

Pfizer was first to the finish line for the next-gen pneumococcal vaccine in adults, but Merck beat its rival with a jab for children in June.

Now, two months after Merck’s 15-valent Vaxneuvance won the FDA stamp of approval for kids, Pfizer is out with some late-stage data on its 20-valent shot for infants.

Known as Prevnar 20 for adults, Pfizer’s 20vPnC will head to the FDA by the end of this year for an approval request in infants, the Big Pharma said Friday morning. Discussions with the FDA will occur first and more late-stage pediatric trials are expected to read out soon, informing the regulatory pathway in other countries and regions.

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Two children with spinal muscular atrophy have died after receiving Novartis’ Zolgensma, a gene therapy designed as a one-time treatment for the rare fatal disease.

The deaths, which resulted from acute liver failure, occurred in Russia and Kazakhstan, Novartis confirmed in a statement to Endpoints News. Having notified health authorities across all the markets where Zolgensma is available, it will update the drug label “to specify that fatal acute liver failure has been reported,” a spokesperson wrote.

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The US House of Representatives today voted along party lines (all Dems voted for it), 220-207 to pass new, wide-ranging legislation that will allow Medicare drug price negotiations for the first time ever, and cap seniors’ drug expenses to $2,000 per year and seniors’ insulin costs at $35 per month.

Setting up a major victory for President Joe Biden, representatives returned from their summer recess to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, even as many noted the bill would only modestly reduce inflation.

Amgen is the latest pharma company to appear on the radar of Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR), who is investigating the way pharma companies are using subsidiaries in low- or zero-tax countries to lower their tax bills.

Like its peers Merck, AbbVie and Bristol Myers Squibb, Wyden notes how Amgen uses its Puerto Rico operations to consistently pay tax rates that are substantially lower than the U.S. corporate tax rate of 21%, with an effective tax rate of 10.7% in 2020 and 12.1% in 2021.

AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo’s antibody-drug conjugate Enhertu scored its second approval in less than a week, this time for a subset of lung cancer patients.

Enhertu received accelerated approval on Thursday to treat adults with unresectable or metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose tumors have activating HER2 (ERBB2) mutations, and who have already received a prior systemic therapy.

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After controversially spinning out its talc liabilities and filing for bankruptcy in an attempt to settle 38,000 lawsuits, Johnson & Johnson is now changing up the formula for its baby powder products.

J&J is beginning the transition to an all cornstarch-based baby powder portfolio, the pharma giant announced on Thursday — just months after a federal judge ruled in favor of its “Texas two-step” bankruptcy to settle allegations that its talc products contained asbestos and caused cancer. An appeals court has since agreed to revisit that case.

CSL is gathering its brands under the family name umbrella, renaming its vaccine and newly acquired nephrology specialty businesses with the parent initials.

CSL Seqirus and CSL Vifor join CSL Plasma and CSL Behring as the four now uniformly branded business units of the global biopharma. The Seqirus vaccine division was formed in 2015 with the combination of bioCSL and its purchase of Novartis’ flu vaccine business. CSL picked up Vifor Pharma late last year in an $11.7 billion deal for the nephrology, iron deficiency and cardio-renal drug developer.

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“CRISPR-by-design” is the idea behind Scribe Therapeutics, a company spun out from Jennifer Doudna’s Nobel-winning lab that’s competing in a closely-tracked field of genome editor companies just starting to make their way to the clinic.

After nabbing $100 million last March for its Series B funding round, Scribe is taking a different tack from some of its competitors, crafting a new enzyme isolated from bacteria called CasX, which has now been tweaked extensively and may be targeted to a range of genome-related diseases, offering a plethora of therapeutic options.

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Bioscience & Technology Business Center The University of Kansas Lawrence, Kansas

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