Lonza Inks deal with Novartis

Perhaps following a lead from rival AstraZeneca’s acquisition of MedImmune, Novartis has entered a “long term” agreement with Lonza to accelerate Novartis’ Biological drug discovery platform.

From SpecChem online:

News Article ID: 14103 14 July 2008 Lonza, Novartis in biological pipeline deal Novartis and Lonza have announced the conclusion of a long-term strategic partnership for the joint development and manufacture of Novartis’s biological pipeline of drugs. Full terms are not being disclosed. “This represents a change in approach from a typical CMO deal. It focuses on a real collaborative approach to development and manufacturing asset planning”, said Dr Stephan Kutzer, head of Lonza Biopharmaceuticals. The agreement, the company added, “reinforces Lonza’s leadership position in process development and manufacturing”. The company will supply development services from its R&D centre in Slough, UK, using its GS Gene Expression System and scale-up and large-scale manufacturing capacity from its various biopharmaceutical operations in the US, Spain and Singapore. This is the single most significant of a number of recent agreements Lonza has reached in the biotechnology field. Within the space of ten days in early July, it closed the acquisition of Amaxa, entered into a strategic product supply agreement with Osiris Therapeutics and signed an exclusive sales agreement with Bar Harbor BioTechnology. The acquisition of the German cell discovery services firm Amaxa was originally announced in May. Amaxa had developed its electroporation-based Nucleofection technology, said to be the first efficient non-viral method for the transfer of DNA or siRNA directly into the nucleus of primary cells and hard-to-transfect cell lines. Its 160 staff are now being integrated into Lonza. With Osiris, Lonza has agreed a clinical and commercial manufacturing agreement for the production of Prochrynal, an adult stem cell therapy that is in Phase III trials for three indications. As part of this, it will build the world’s first commercial-scale allogenic cGMP manufacturing facility, as well as additional cGMP grade cell culture media, at the former Cambrex site in Walkersville, Maryland, in a “multi-million” dollar investment. Under its deal with Bar Harbor, Lonza has become the sole global distributor of Bar Harbor’s Stellaray gene expression system products. The alliance also covers the Cell Discovery business of Lonza Bioscience, which was also formerly part of Cambrex and which claims to be the world’s leading supplier of primary cells. One of the main reasons that Big Pharma is getting in bed with the Biotechs is that biological drug and therapies are much more difficult than biologically active chemicals to get approved and, most importantly, to “clone”, knock-off or make into a generic equivalent. This greatly extends the exclusivity (i.e. PROFIT$$) the owner maintains, becasue the time for entry into the market is longer. Looks like most of the Lonza-Novartis stuff will be outside the US, but eventually one would think the cell production side would come back to little old Walkersville, MD. So now, who’s nipping at who’s heels?