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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