Emergent BioSolutions Inc. said Monday it has signed a five-year agreement with Johnson & Johnson to manufacture its Covid-19 vaccine candidate, just a couple of months after striking a $135 million deal for the first step of their collaboration.
For the first two years of the deal, valued at $480 million, the Gaithersburg biotech will serve as a contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) to Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc., part of New Brunswick, New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson. Emergent will produce the drug substance at its Baltimore Bayview facility, beginning in 2021, at large scale for commercial manufacturing. Beginning in 2023, Emergent will support additional batches, and the partners will agree on terms for those last three years of the deal in 2021, according to the company.
“Over the next five years, we are committing our leading CDMO services to advance this important vaccine candidate,” Syed Husain, senior vice president and CDMO business unit head at Emergent, said in a statement. “We have the expertise and capabilities to meet the long-term needs of our customers and provide ongoing commercial manufacturing to benefit patients.”
J&J would need to succeed in clinical trials and earn regulatory approval to take a Covid-19 vaccine to market. But those steps aren’t necessary for Emergent to perform large-scale production, which can happen at-risk, or before a Food and Drug Administration approval, Syed said in an email to the WBJ. But for J&J to distribute products to patients, the company would need either that commercial approval or emergency use authorization from the FDA.
The agreement comes on top of the contract Emergent locked in with J&J in April, involving transferring the technology to the local company’s facility, investing in additional equipment and some initial manufacturing of products for clinical trials. The new deal will begin once that contract’s terms are completed, marking “the next step of the relationship,” which Emergent CEO Bob Kramer foreshadowed in an interview at the time.
“We have built a business to be deployed exactly for this time and this purpose, and it is gratifying to be in a position where we can make a difference,” Kramer said of its work with J&J and other coronavirus-related initiatives.
Emergent signed this deal just two weeks after announcing plans to invest $75 million to expand its manufacturing capacity and footprint beyond Maryland, as the Montgomery County biotech builds up its CDMO work with multiple companies for their Covid-19 programs — on top of its own. That list now includes AstraZeneca, Novavax and Vaxart. Emergent also landed a $628 million contract with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to manufacture several other vaccine candidates.
Emergent, one of DC Inno’s 2020 Inno on Fire, saw its stock trade up 2.6% at $86.26 as of 3 p.m. Monday.
Editor’s Note: This story first appeared in the Washington Business Journal. See the original post here.
