As manufacturers continue to invest in facilities throughout Ireland, J&J is looking to get in on the action even more.
The company announced on Friday that its vision subsidiary, Johnson & Johnson Vision Care Ireland, will expand its manufacturing facility in Plassey, Ireland, a suburb of the city of Limerick.
The company is placing a €100 million ($100.2 million) investment in the facility, which includes putting in new manufacturing lines that are fully automated. According to a company spokesperson in an email to Endpoints News, construction on the site has already started and is expected to begin production in 2024.
Around 80 more jobs are expected to be added once the project is finished, and the company is already actively hiring at the site.
The site primarily makes Acuvue contact lenses for patients with astigmatism and, according to the company, is one of the largest contact lens manufacturing facilities in the world.
“We have been in Limerick for more than 25 years and our success is a testament to our talented workforce,” said John Lynch, the plant leader for J&J Vision Care Ireland, in a statement.
The expansion is not the only J&J project in the works on the Emerald Isle. The company is also expanding its API and monoclonal antibody production facility, also in Limerick, to the tune of $446 million.
Ireland has been awash with building and expansion projects from a wide array of pharma manufacturers.
Last month, both Abbott Laboratories and Horizon announced major projects. Abbott will invest around $451 million to build a new manufacturing plant in Kilkenny to make more of its glucose monitors, while Horizon will build a 320,000-square-foot expansion to the 44,000-square-foot facility they acquired in Waterford last year for $65 million.
This also comes as Merck KGaA, Cambrex, Alexion, AstraZeneca and SK are all embarking on major expansions or building projects in the country this year.
If you work in cancer biomarker and target research, chances are you use data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) to help you make discoveries. This comprehensive and coordinated effort helps accelerate our understanding of the molecular causes of cancer through genomic analyses, including large-scale genome sequencing. TCGA covers 33 types of cancer with multi-omics data, such as RNA-seq, DNA-seq, copy number, microRNA-seq, and others. Detailed analyses of individual TCGA datasets, as well as pan-cancer meta-analysis, have revealed new cancer subtypes with important therapeutic implications. A key value here is the TCGA metadata. TCGA samples include extensive clinical metadata for diverse cancers. However, inconsistent terminology and formatting limit the utility of these data for pan-cancer analyses.
The first slice of data has arrived from a dose escalating study of Intellia’s in vivo CRISPR treatment for hereditary angioedema, and it’s a promising first step toward a potential once-and-done therapy.
The CRISPR crew at Intellia $NTLA reported Friday morning that six HAE patients treated with either the low 25 mg dose or the high 75 mg dose of NTLA-2002 experienced a 65% and 92% mean reduction in plasma kallikrein. The low-dose group experienced a 91% reduction in HAE attacks after the drug was used to knock out the KLKB1 gene in liver cells.
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While Moderna has been focused on building out its manufacturing apparatus in North America, Europe and Africa, the company appears to be turning toward Japan for its next act.
According to a report from Nikkei Asia, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said the company would like to build a facility in Japan as well as centralize all processes, including manufacturing, into a single facility.
While no other details on the manufacturing site were offered, such as location and timing, Bancel said the site would ideally manufacture vaccines for Covid-19, flu and other diseases. Endpoints News reached out to Moderna to get more details on the matter but they did not respond by press time.
The Department of Health and Human Services is taking the next step in its campaign to encourage Covid-19 vaccinations. The new fall “We Can Do This” ads move past the initial message to get a vaccine and asks Americans — especially people aged 50 and older — to get an “updated vaccine.”
Updated or bivalent boosters are the newer Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines that add Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 components to the original vaccine — the CDC and HHS both recommended the shots earlier this month.
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Although “pay-for-delay” agreements and other egregious generic-blocking tactics may be in the rearview mirror, a new report from the nonprofit I-Mak explains how companies are still looking to protect the next generation of blockbusters with piles of new patents.
While some industry insiders point to a broken system that incentivizes these dozens and dozens of new patents — on average there are 74 granted patents on each of America’s 10 top-selling drugs — drugmakers have filed more than 140 patent applications on average per drug, and about two-thirds of those filings came after the approval.
GSK now has dozens more Zantac lawsuits to contend with.
Plaintiffs on Wednesday filed 88 suits against GSK in Delaware court on behalf of more than 7,000 claimants who allege the popular ranitidine heartburn products caused a range of cancers. Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim and Sanofi, which owned Zantac rights at various points in time, were also named in the suit, in addition to Thermo Fisher’s Patheon Manufacturing Services.
Novo Nordisk never hesitated in its pursuit of Forma’s sickle cell drug etavopivat. Dating back to the early part of 2021, Novo execs were reaching out to Forma to see if they could work out a collaboration. And from the start, Forma wasn’t much interested in that sort of an alliance.
But things got serious after Forma laid out its update on the program at ASH in early December.
The data were from a small Phase I trial, and Forma concluded:
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In August, Alnylam touted a Phase III success for transthyretin amyloidosis, or ATTR for short, with cardiomyopathy — a disease that causes protein buildup in the heart, so it can’t pump at full capacity. However, Intellia and Regeneron are here to compete, with a therapy that only needs to be dosed once.
In today’s update on part 1 of the study, Intellia said that its therapy, known as NTLA-2001, reduced mean serum transthyretin (the protein that builds up in the heart) by 93% and 92% in patients who got either a 0.7 mg/kg or 1.0 mg/kg dose of the therapy, respectively.
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WARN notices in California have shed light on some of the inner workings of biotech and pharma — and newly unveiled notices point at two of the industry’s largest players.
AbbVie and Bristol Myers Squibb separately notified the state earlier this week that they plan on letting go 360 employees combined by the end of November — almost 100 at AbbVie and the rest from Bristol Myers.
AbbVie did not respond to repeated attempts for clarification from Endpoints News.
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Bioscience & Technology Business Center The University of Kansas Lawrence, Kansas
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