Charles River and Chiesi to Extend Six-year Partnership

Multiple drug discovery capabilities supplied to Italian drugs firm.

Charles River Laboratories (CRL), an early-stage contract research organization (CRO) to the pharmaceutical industry, has announced an extension to the integrated drug discovery partnership it has had with Italy’s Chiesi Farmaceutici since 2011 in the field of respiratory drugs.

This will mean CRL continuing to supply Chiesi with services including medicinal chemistry, ADME/DMPK studies, pharmaceutics, in vitro assays, in vivo models and safety pharmacology studies to identify and test candidates for preclinical development. The length of the extension was not disclosed.

According to Birgit Girshick, Corporate Senior Vice President, Global Discovery at CRL, the partnership has been “extremely productive,” generating a “significant number” of patents and development candidates. CRL has been active in respiratory research generally for over 16 years, during which time its scientists have been named as co-inventors on nearly 70 respiratory patents and have produced 25 development candidates.

Chiesi, which is based in Parma, specializes in respiratory therapeutics and rare diseases. It accounts for five of the six patents published by CRL at the World Intellectual Property Organization and one of them names CRL scientists as co-inventors. Chiesi has also recently signed a deal with Aptuit to co-develop new therapies for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

In January, CRL announced that over the past year it had doubled its support for Moderna Therapeutics’ scale-up of its discovery efforts and development pipeline, specifically for messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics. This partnership also began in 2011. During that time, the two companies have worked to designing specific protocols to assess safety in mRNA development candidates, with Moderna using CRL’s support in non-GLP and GLP toxicology studies among other services.

Moderna, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, currently has 12 mRNA development candidates in its development pipeline, covering infectious diseases, immuno-oncology and cardiovascular disease. Five clinical trials are now in progress.

During 2016, CRL has separately announced, revenue increased by 23.3% to $1.68 billion from $1.36 billion in 2015. Organic revenue growth was 7.7%. The rest was accounted for by the acquisitions of WIL Research, Agilux Laboratories, Blue Stream Laboratories and Oncotest during the year.

Of the company’s three segments, Discovery & Safety Assessment was most impacted by the changes, seeing revenue rise by 36.7% from $612.2 million in 2015 to $836.6 million. Its organic revenue growth was 8.9%. Manufacturing Support, meanwhile, saw a 25% increase from $280.7 million in 2015 to $350.8 million, with 11.3% organic growth. Finally, Research Models & Services was barely affected, with organic revenue growth of 4.1% essentially driving a 5.0% increase in sales from $470.4 million to $494.0 million

On February 10th, CRL completed the divestiture of its contract development and manufacturing (CDMO) business to Quotient Clinical for $75 million, subject to certain post-closing adjustments. This business, which represented about 1% of CRL’s 2016 consolidated revenue, came to CRL as part of Netherlands-based WIL Research.

The CDMO business provides services to support the formulation design and manufacture of oral drug dosages for biopharmaceutical clients, particularly high-potency compounds. CRL said that the business was “not optimized within [our] portfolio at its current scale and that the capital could be better deployed in other long-term growth opportunities.”

 

Andrew Warmington

Based in the UK, Andrew worked on developing content for the online enterprise of Pharma's Almanac and leading critical custom projects. Andrew has been working as an analyst and journalist in manufacturing industry, mainly chemicals-related, since 1993. For the last 14 years, he has been the editor of the highly respected monthly magazine, Speciality Chemicals Magazine. Andrew holds a doctoral degree from Oxford University.

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