Business digest

Global pharma major AstraZeneca has ditched its plans for a £450m vaccines expansion and modernisation project at its Speke, Liverpool, UK site. The company has said a contributory factor was the ‘timing and reduction of the final offer [of funding], compared with the previous Government’s proposal’.

German specialty chemicals company Evonik and Chinese chemicals manufacturer Fuhua Tongda Chemicals Company have established a joint venture in Leshan, Sichuan Province, China to produce and market hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) in China. The new company, Evonik Fuhua New Materials (Sichuan), has Evonik as a 51% shareholder with the other 49% held by Fuhua. Using industrial-grade H2O2 supplied by Fuhua, the joint venture will produce specialty-grade hydrogen peroxide for applications such as solar panels, semiconductors, and food packaging.

China’s Zhao Derivatives has acquired Swiss headquartered Lonza’s Macromolecule CDMO Plant in Guangzhou Knowledge City.

The US Department of Energy has announced an investment of $25m across eleven projects to advance materials, processes, machines and equipment for domestic manufacturing of next-generation batteries. These projects will advance platform technologies upon which battery manufacturing capabilities can be built, enabling flexible, scalable and highly controllable battery manufacturing processes.

New figures revealed in the BioIndustry Association’s annual UK biotech financing report show that the UK biotech sector achieved significant growth in 2024, raising £3.5bn in investment – a 94% increase, compared with 2023. This represents the highest annual figure since the £4.5bn raised in 2021 and is a testament to the sector’s resilience, innovation, and global appeal, even in the face of challenging economic conditions. However, despite the welcome increase, the report cautioned that investment was concentrated in a small number of companies that raised big rounds, primarily from US investors, who are increasingly attracted to the UK sector. Key highlights from the report are: venture capital (VC) funding secured £2.06bn across 111 deals; North America accounted for 26% of VC investors in the UK sector, while European investors made up 15%; and £1.5bn was raised through follow-on financings, marking a 170% increase from 2023. UK companies listed on Nasdaq dominated these raises, highlighting the global recognition of the country’s biotech innovation.

US pharma AbbVie has announced it has a definitive agreement to acquire US biotech Nimble Therapeutics for a cash payment of $200m. The deal includes Nimble’s lead asset, an investigational oral peptide IL23R inhibitor in preclinical development for the treatment of psoriasis and a pipeline of other novel oral peptide candidates with potential across several autoimmune diseases. Additionally, AbbVie will acquire Nimble’s peptide synthesis, screening, and optimisation platform, which uses proprietary technology to help drive rapid discovery and optimisation of peptide candidates for a range of targets.

US biotech Regeneron has acquired UK clinical-stage therapeutic company Oxular, which makes ocular delivery technology for retinal disorders.

US chemical producer Dow and US venture capital firm Innventure have announced plans to collaborate in developing and commercialising new waste-to-value technologies. The collaboration aims to enable scalable, cost-effective conversion of mixed wastes to petrochemical feedstocks. Innventure has created a new subsidiary, Refinity, which will work with Dow to produce sustainable chemicals to serve as direct replacements for existing fossil-fuel-based feedstocks. Dow will provide technical resources to support the engineering development and deployment of the new processes, and work with Refinity to identify preferred sites for future commercial plant operations.

Reckitt Benckiser, a UK manufacturer and distributor of personal care, household, specialty products, nutrition, toiletry and healthcare products, has acquired a site in Wilson, North Carolina in the US to expand its US manufacturing footprint and allow it to produce Mucinex tablets and liquids to meet increased consumer demand for cold and flu symptom relief in the US. The $200m investment will establish a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility and become Reckitt’s biggest over-the-counter manufacturing facility in the US. It is expected to create nearly 300 jobs.

Lonza, a Swiss manufacturer in the pharma, biotech and nutraceutical markets, has announced capacity expansions at its sites in Rewari, India and Suzhou, China. The expansions include additional hard gelatin capsule capacity, supporting Lonza’s specialised capsule production for the pharmaceutical and nutraceutical industries.

UK biopharma GSK and US clinical-stage biopharma IDRx, which is developing precision therapeutics for the treatment of gastrointestinal stromal tumour (GIST), have entered into an agreement under which GSK will acquire IDRx for $1bn. The acquisition includes lead molecule, IDRX-42, a highly selective KIT TKI (tyrosine kinase inhibitor) being developed as a first- and second-line therapy for GIST treatment.

German pharma and biotech Bayer and Neste, a Finnish producer of sustainable aviation fuel and renewable diesel, have signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly scale winter canola as a biomass-based feedstock for renewable products like biofuels. Within the collaboration, the companies are going to develop a winter canola ecosystem in the Southern Great Plains of the US. The two companies expect to finalise a definitive agreement in 2025.

US biopharma Gilead Sciences and Danish pharma LEO Pharma have unveiled a strategic partnership to accelerate the development and commercialisation of LEO Pharma’s small molecule oral STAT6 (signal transducer and activator of transcription 6) programmes for the potential treatment of patients with inflammatory diseases. Under the deal, Gilead will acquire LEO Pharma’s comprehensive preclinical oral STAT6 small molecule inhibitors and targeted protein degraders. Gilead will lead further development efforts for the oral programmes, while LEO Pharma will lead development for potential topical formulations of STAT6 inhibitors.

Glox Therapeutics, a UK company pioneering the development of precision antibiotic therapies based on naturally occurring bacteriocins, has announced it has been awarded a share of the £3m Collaborative Discovery Programme (CDP) launched by the Cystic Fibrosis Antimicrobial Resistance Syndicate (CF AMR) with funding from the medical research charity, LifeArc. Glox Therapeutics will receive up to £500,000 of the fund to accelerate the development of its novel precision antibiotics, helping to address the growing need for effective treatments to overcome antimicrobial-resistant lung infections in people with cystic fibrosis.

BioDuro, a US contract research, development and manufacturing organisation (CRDMO), has opened a fully automated solid-phase peptide synthesis scale-up laboratory at its Shanghai Zhangjiang High-tech Park campus in China. The kg-scale peptide laboratory is equipped with automated solid-phase peptide synthesisers, cleavage systems and freeze-drying equipment, supporting peptide synthesis scale-up to 800mmol. It is designed to produce a wide range of peptide molecules, including linear peptides, cyclic peptides and various peptide drug conjugates.

US pharma AbbVie and US biotech Neomorph have announced a collaboration and option-to-license agreement to develop novel molecular glue degraders for multiple targets across oncology and immunology. Molecular glue degraders are a class of small molecules that are designed to selectively target and trigger degradation of proteins that drive cancer growth or immune system disregulation, offering a more precise approach to treatment. They have the potential to target proteins that have historically been defined as ‘undruggable’.

German chemical company Wacker Chemie has started up two new production facilities for specialty silicones in Japan and South Korea, strengthening the company’s activities in the Asian market. The new plants, located in Tsukuba, Japan, and in Jincheon, South Korea, will serve the demand from the automotive and construction industries.

French pharmaceutical group Servier and Google Cloud, have announced an expanded five-year partnership focused on using AI and generative AI to accelerate the research and development of innovative therapeutic solutions for patients.

Researchers at Imperial College London will receive almost £15m in funding to embark on cutting-edge research to help overcome neurodegenerative disease. Four Imperial-led projects are among 18 projects funded by the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) as part of a £69m package to unlock new methods to interface with the human brain. The funding will support research groups across the UK over a period of four years. The programme aims to deliver breakthroughs that could help to treat many of the most complex and devastating brain disorders affecting individuals and communities worldwide. The four projects cover regenerating damaged brains; developing cutting-edge ultrasound tools; targeted brain drug delivery; and brain stimulation.

Japanese life science company Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, the world’s second largest contract manufacturer of biopharmaceuticals, is increasing its production in Denmark. The expansion at the company’s Hillerød facility will raise capacity from six to twelve bioreactors for mammalian cell culture, making it the largest end-to-end biopharmaceutical manufacturing site in Europe.

Enilive has commissioned its first plant to produce Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) at the Gela biorefinery, in Sicily. Production has started at the plant which has a capacity of 400,000t/year, representing almost a third of the expected European SAF demand in 2025, following the implementation of the ReFuelEU Aviation regulation. Enilive aims to increase its biorefining capacity to over 5mt/year by 2030 and enhance its SAF production to 1mt/year by 2026, with further potential to double production by 2030. These targets will be supported by ongoing projects at the Venice biorefinery and the construction of new biorefineries in Malaysia and South Korea. The Gela biorefinery has the capacity to process 736,000t/year of biomass primarily derived from waste and residual feedstocks such as used cooking oils, animal fat and by-products from vegetable oil processing. Regulation (EU) 2023/2405 requires aviation fuel providers to ensure that jet fuel supplied to aircraft operators at each airport in the European Union contains a proportion of SAF. The required proportion of SAF will increase over five-year increments from a minimum 2% from 1 January 2025 to 6% from 2030, 20% from 2035, 34% from 2040, 42 % from 2045, until reaching 70% from 2050. 

Swiss agro-chemicals company Syngenta Crop Protection has reached a new milestone in its collaboration with US AI-informed crop health company Enko to discover novel weed control molecules, advancing efforts to bring innovation in herbicide technology to farmers. The collaboration targets a new mode of action, which is the way the herbicide controls susceptible plants. The discovery of new leads targeting this mode was made using Enko’s ENKOMPASS platform, which reduces time and cost, compared with conventional agricultural R&D approaches.

UK privately owned CDMO Touchlight has announced that its facility in Hampton, UK, has received GMP certification. As a result, Touchlight becomes the first synthetic DNA manufacturer globally to gain regulatory approval to produce active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), enabling the company to support its customer base develop DNA vaccines and non-viral gene therapies.

City Therapeutics, a US privately held biopharma working with RNA interference (RNAi)-based medicines, has entered into a strategic collaboration with US-Canadian eye health company Bausch + Lomb to develop therapy for the treatment of retinal diseases including geographic atrophy, an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration that causes irreversible vision loss.

Norwegian chemical company Yara, which produces nitrogen-based mineral fertilisers and related industrial products, has started production of renewable-based ammonia in Brazil. The company uses biomethane made from sugarcane waste, which can replace fossil natural gas, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by up to 75%. In coffee farming alone, Yara anticipates a reduction of up to 40% in the carbon footprint of harvested beans. Looking ahead, Yara plans to expand its portfolio to include products using carbon capture and storage.

Pharmaceutical diagnostics supplier, GE Healthcare is investing $138m to expand its Carrigtohill site in Cork, Ireland. A new facility will enable 25m/year more patient doses of contrast media to be produced by end-2027. The facility will include solution preparation vessels, multifunctional powder handling systems, a new filling line and autoclaves all with advance automation systems.

UK contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) Upperton Pharma Solutions has completed a new sterile manufacturing facility at its Nottingham, UK, site. The facility has been designed in line with the revised EU GMP Annex-1 regulations to support the production of aseptic and terminally sterilised small volume liquids and powders for parenteral, nasal and pulmonary delivery, with batch sizes up to 2000 vials, prefilled syringes and cartridges.

German-based CDMO, Rentschler Biopharma has re-aligned its global business operations, withdrawing from cell and gene therapy and increasing its focus on biologics. It is also ceasing operations at its Stevenage, UK, site.

Canadian lithium producer, E3 Lithium has successfully produced battery quality lithium carbonate from Leduc brines using its demonstration-scale equipment in its Calgary laboratory. Further work is planned to test various operating parameters ahead of the demonstration facility operations.

Polymer specialist Americhem has opened a new R&D centre at the Olive Industrial Park in Silvassa, India. The centre will offer specialised testing services for masterbatch development, particularly for melt-spinning and textile manufacturing customers.

Lantheus Holdings, a radiopharmaceutical specialist based in Massachusetts, US, is acquiring Evergreen Theragnostics for an upfront payment of $250m and an additional $752.5m in potential milestone payments. Evergreen is a clinical stage radio pharma, drug discovery and commercialisation CDMO headquartered in Springfield, New Jersey, US.

Global pharma Orion has entered a research collaboration with Invenra, a biotech with proprietary technology for discovering novel therapeutics. The collaboration is focused on discovering bispecific antibodies using Invenra’s B-Body platform. Orion will be responsible for target selection and solely responsible for development, manufacturing and global commercialisation of candidates.