Iambic Therapeutics, Inc.

Welcome to Endpoints News’ manufacturing briefs, where we bring you essential news on new builds, collaborations, recalls and more. The Government of Canada is contributing $62 million to Entos Pharmaceuticals to build a 103,000 square-foot manufacturing and R&D facility in Edmonton, Alberta. The build will cost a total of $198.5 million and will hire 90 new employees, according to a Tuesday release. CDMO Vetter is investing over €150 million ($163 million) to expand its warehouse in Ravensburg, Germany. The move will increase its cool storage services, according to a Tuesday release. The European Commission has launched a new regulation called the Critical Medicines Act to improve the continent’s pharma supply chains. The act will increase or improve EU manufacturing capacity for raw materials and drug products, among others. Some member states will or have received financial support to improve manufacturing, according to a Monday release. The Noramco Group is investing $25 million into its factory in Whippany, NJ, to expand manufacturing of sterile injectables, syringes and vials, the company said Monday. Scimplify has secured $40 million in a Series B raise, which will be used to scale up its chemical manufacturing platform, the company announced Wednesday. LGM Pharma is investing over $6 million to expand its Rosenberg, TX, manufacturing site for making liquid, semi-solid and suppository drug products, the company said Wednesday. WuXi XDC has signed a memorandum of understanding with the South Korean biotech AbTis, the company said Tuesday. WuXi will provide its ADC discovery services and manufacturing platform and AbTis will bring its conjugation tech. Emergent BioSolutions and Swiss vaccine company Rocketvax have entered into a new partnership . Emergent will manufacture and commercialize four of Rocketvax’s clinical stage assets, the companies said Wednesday. RoslinCT and Ayrmid Pharma announced their intent to partner on the production of the cell therapy Omisirge for blood cancer, the companies announced Tuesday. RoslinCT will tech transfer and commercially make the drug at its site in Hopkinton, MA.

Entos Pharmaceuticals, a spinout of the University of Alberta, linked up with Eli Lilly in a research collaboration and licensing agreement in 2022. With grant funding from governments at multiple levels in Canada, Entos Pharmaceuticals is looking to plant roots at a CAD $198.5 million ($137.2 million) R&D and manufacturing hub in Edmonton.The 103,000-square-foot R&D center and biomanufacturing plant will be used to develop and produce the company’s Fusogenix proteolipid vehicles (PLVs). The space will support the University of Alberta spin-off's continued evolution, building on its partnership with Eli Lilly centered on the PLV drug delivery technology. In 2022, Lilly shelled out $50 million upfront for exclusive rights to use the tech for nucleic acid-based products targeting the central and peripheral nervous systems.Besides aiding Entos' industry collaborations, the new digs will help to build out Canada’s capacity for domestic drug manufacturing, the company noted in a press release. The Government of Canada agreed to chip in $62 million CAD ($42.8 million) for the site, while the Government of Alberta committed $15.5 million CAD ($10.7 million).Entos was born from the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and formed as its own entity in 2016.“Our government is protecting the Canadians of tomorrow by making the necessary investments today,” Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, said in the release. “By supporting the construction of this state-of-the-art facility in Edmonton, we are strengthening our capacity to produce cutting-edge therapeutics and vaccines, which will better equip Canada in responding to future health emergencies.” Canada has been home to a few new facilities in life sciences lately as the country looks to increase its domestic supply, including a cell and gene manufacturing plant from CDMO OmniaBio and the country’s largest vaccine manufacturing site courtesy of Sanofi.Entos, meanwhile, is “thrilled to receive this investment,” CEO John Lewis said in a statement. “It will help us develop, scale up, produce, and commercialize Fusogenix PLV therapeutics to address critical health needs and fill gaps in Canada’s domestic manufacturing capacity," he added.The company, which also operates in San Diego, California and London, England, uses its proprietary fusogenic fusion associated small transmembrane (FAST) proteins to enable the delivery of mRNA or DNA into target cells. Before Lilly hopped on board, Entos and BioMarin entered into a collaboration in 2021, although that partnership is no longer listed on the company’s website.Separately, Entos is working on drug candidates in cystic fibrosis, Stargardt disease and obesity, including a GLP-1 gene therapy program.

As he was testing new antivirals to halt a future pandemic, John Chodera encountered an unlikely set of new problems that ultimately helped lead to his new job. The computational chemist won a $68 million grant in 2022 from the National Institutes of Health to help lead a five-year effort to develop new antivirals. That work ended prematurely when Congress decided in 2023 to effectively abandon that initiative. “We found out a five-year program to discover drugs was really going to be a three-year halfway bridge to nowhere,” Chodera said in an interview. “If you give up halfway across the river, you don’t get a useful bridge with half the capacity. You don’t get anything useful at all, unfortunately.” After a decade-plus of running a computational biology lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering, Chodera is now venturing out on his own as a first-time CEO. The antiviral experience wasn’t just a lesson in whimsical pandemic funding, but it brought Chodera closer to the process of discovering drugs. The 47-year-old had previously developed software to simulate molecules, most notably OpenMM , but the drug-hunting effort showed how today’s tools — even AI-powered ones — lacked the accuracy or scalability to do what’s needed in finding, testing and making drugs. Chodera is now CEO and president of Achira, a biotech startup incorporated last summer that launched Friday with a $33 million seed round. Achira is aiming to build the next generation of these computational tools for drug discovery, which Chodera calls “atomistic foundation simulation models.” That’s a complicated way of saying his team is blending AI- and physics-based methods together to try to improve drug discovery. Chodera’s co-founders are Theofanis Karaletsos, head of AI at the Chan Zuckerberg Institute and formerly an AI leader at the biotech insitro, and Zavain Dar, a co-founder and managing partner of Dimension. Dimension led the seed round, which exceeded an initial $15 million target and included Amplify Partners, Compound, and NVentures, Nvidia’s VC arm. Dar said Dimension spoke with over 50 biotechs on the theme of combining machine learning and molecular dynamics, ultimately deciding to start a new company with Chodera and Karaletsos. Those two have known each other for about a decade, and have long discussed the ideas that turned into Achira. “We want to turn drug discovery into 90% compute and 10% experiment,” Karaletsos said. “This is the domain where we can do it based on first principles.” Achira’s view is that neither physics-based methods nor machine-learning models are enough on their own in drug discovery. ML models still don’t have enough drug discovery data, Chodera said. And physics methods, like molecular dynamic simulations that power Schrödinger’s ubiquitous software, are powerful but limited. Those calculations need tons of compute power to show molecules wriggling, moving and interacting with each other. Scientists face a trade-off in how many molecules and how long those simulations can be. Chodera, who previously served on Schrödinger’s scientific advisory board, said the computational framework known as force fields that power those simulations has effectively gone unchanged for over four decades. In the meantime, compute power has grown exponentially. “This stuff has not changed fundamentally in 45 years, which is crazy because those models were built for a PDP-11, a late 1970s-era computer,” he said. “The cost per FLOP [floating-point operation, a cost-effectiveness metric for compute power] is now 160 billion times less than it was at that time, and we still are using the same functional form.” Achira is developing a type of AI model called neural network potentials that rely on the physical laws of nature to simulate molecules. Achira plans to then generate synthetic data by using these models, making large biological datasets that are in short supply today. “The foundation simulation models that we are building are going to be extremely general,” Chodera said, meaning they could subsequently be trained for a range of tasks like predicting a molecule’s binding affinities, selectivity or stability. The 10-employee company has hired several notable scientists, including CTO Daniel Smith, a co-founder of Iambic Therapeutics and most recently head of computation at a Flagship Pioneering startup called Abiologics , and a mix of computational biologists, theoretical chemists, biophysicists and chemical engineers. Achira expects to grow around the hubs of AI talent in San Francisco and New York. Achira’s leaders declined to specify what business model it may pursue, but won’t start by building its own pipeline of drugs. Chodera said he expects to have “some fun stuff to share later this year” on its first generation of its simulation models.