The Swiss CD­MO pow­er­house Lon­za is no stranger to Is­rael, but a re­cent in­vest­ment has ce­ment­ed a new hold over biotech in the re­gion.

Ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny, Lon­za and the Is­rael Biotech Fund, a ven­ture fund in­vest­ing in Is­raeli and Is­raeli-re­lat­ed biotech com­pa­nies, an­nounced a two-year frame­work agree­ment.

The deal aims to pro­vide ac­cel­er­at­ed time­lines for the de­vel­op­ment and man­u­fac­ture of bi­o­log­ics and small mol­e­cules. Lon­za will add sup­port to the IBF by work­ing to de-risk and pro­vide de­vel­op­ment and man­u­fac­tur­ing ser­vices to the IBF’s port­fo­lio com­pa­nies. The fi­nan­cial terms of the deal were not dis­closed.

The IBF will in turn pro­vide Lon­za with ac­cess to IBF’s port­fo­lio com­pa­nies and broad net­work in the biotech in­dus­try in Is­rael.

The agree­ment will try to broad­en the scope of ser­vices pro­vid­ed by Lon­za to phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies in the Is­raeli biotech ecosys­tem.

Pn­i­na Weitz, Lon­za’s glob­al head of ven­ture cap­i­tal busi­ness de­vel­op­ment and re­la­tion­ship man­age­ment, not­ed that de­spite Is­rael’s size, the coun­try had over 1,750 life sci­ence com­pa­nies ac­tive at the end of 2020, many of which are start-ups and small biotech com­pa­nies.

“If these com­pa­nies can re­tain in­vestor in­ter­est and bring their ther­a­peu­tics to lat­er stages, it can po­si­tion them for ac­qui­si­tion or even tak­ing their mol­e­cules to mar­ket them­selves – an op­tion more star­tups are choos­ing due to in­creased fund­ing,” Weitz said in an email to End­points News. 

Lon­za isn’t the on­ly big play­er to start work­ing with the IBF. In 2021, Mer­ck, Pfiz­er, As­traZeneca, Te­va and Ama­zon teamed up to launch a new in­cu­ba­tor with the IBF for star­tups walk­ing the line be­tween AI and drug de­vel­op­ment. Lon­za has been plac­ing more re­sources in the coun­try as, in 2018, the CD­MO opened a 10,000-square-foot lab fa­cil­i­ty in Haifa.

In­di­an drug man­u­fac­tur­er opens and up­dates sev­er­al fa­cil­i­ties across the globe

The In­di­an drug man­u­fac­tur­er Pi­ra­mal Phar­ma So­lu­tions has been busy for the past few days.

First, a new pro­duc­tion block came on­line at the com­pa­ny’s drug prod­uct site in Pi­tham­pur, In­dia, last Tues­day.

The new pro­duc­tion area can now han­dle batch sizes of 150 to 600 kilo­grams, al­low­ing the site’s ca­pac­i­ty to pro­duce OSD form drug prod­ucts. Ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny, the site was fund­ed as part of an $11 mil­lion cap­i­tal in­vest­ment by Pi­ra­mal.

The Pi­tham­pur site’s ca­pac­i­ty has now in­creased from 3 bil­lion dos­es to 4.5 bil­lion dos­es and will em­ploy ap­prox­i­mate­ly 600 work­ers. The site will aim to sup­ply drug prod­ucts to biotech and phar­ma com­pa­nies glob­al­ly, and the site has been in­spect­ed by a host of reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies in­clud­ing the FDA.

Now the man­u­fac­tur­er has al­so opened a new API plant in Au­ro­ra, On­tario, Cana­da. The new plant was con­struct­ed as part of a CAD 30 mil­lion ($23 mil­lion) cap­i­tal in­vest­ment in its Au­ro­ra site. The site has more than 10,000 square-feet of new man­u­fac­tur­ing space and in­cludes two new re­ac­tor suites with ad­di­tion­al fil­tra­tion and dry­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

The site has al­so been in­spect­ed by reg­u­la­tors in the US, UK and Japan.

Pi­ra­mal has al­ready been on a tear this year. In Jan­u­ary, the CD­MO an­nounced plans to in­vest mil­lions to cre­ate a high-through­put screen­ing fa­cil­i­ty to en­hance its in vit­ro bi­ol­o­gy ca­pa­bil­i­ties at its drug dis­cov­ery site in Ahmed­abad, In­dia. The new ex­pan­sion is sched­uled to go live in Q3 of this year.