BioPharma

Thermo Fisher to buy gene therapy contract manufacturer Brammer Bio for $1.7B

Brammer specializes in contract services for viral vector-based gene therapies. Panelists at a conference last week stressed the importance of manufacturing for gene therapy investors.

By Alaric DeArment on March 25, 2019

A company that makes products for science researchers has bought one of the largest contract manufacturers of viral vectors for gene therapy.

Waltham, Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher Scientific said Sunday that it will acquire Brammer Bio for $1.7 billion. Brammer, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a privately owned contract development and manufacturing organization that handles manufacturing for gene therapy companies. According to Thermo Fisher, it is expected to deliver $250 million in revenues this year. Subscription-based business news service Mergermarket originally reported on plans by Thermo Fisher to acquire Brammer in January.

Additional companies engaged in contract manufacturing for gene therapy include Switzerland-based Lonza, which notably has a longstanding relationship with bluebird bio; BioReliance, owned by German drugmaker Merck KGaA; Japan-based Takara Bio; and Paragon Bioservices, among others.

Still, Thermo Fisher’s acquisition of Brammer comes at an important time in the evolution of gene therapy. The only gene therapy that currently has Food and Drug Administration approval – Spark Therapeutics’ Luxturna (voretigene neparvovec), for a rare form of blindness – and the majority of gene therapies currently in development rely on viral vectors, the area in which Brammer specializes. With these therapies, specially engineered viruses are used to transfect cells and insert corrected genes into them, in the hopes of providing long-term cures for genetic diseases. Roche said last month it would buy Spark for $4.8 billion.

Contract manufacturing has long been an important part of the biopharma ecosystem, particularly for smaller companies that have yet to develop their own manufacturing capacity, and gene therapy is no exception. Until it opened its own manufacturing plant in November 2017, for example, even bluebird bio relied primarily on contract manufacturing for its gene and cell therapies.

For investors, manufacturing is an especially crucial component to their calculus when evaluating gene therapy companies, panelists said in a panel at the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine’s Cell & Gene Therapy Investor Day in New York last Thursday.

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But some disagreement arose between panelists about whether contract or in-house manufacturing was preferable, with most panelists preferring the in-house approach, especially in the context of long-term development and commercialization.

Photo: designer491, Getty Images