On a quest to branch out beyond small molecule manufacturing, Taiwan’s Bora Pharmaceuticals is buying assets from a controversial biopharma player.
Bora is paying $50 million to $100 million to get its hands on the local contract manufacturing assets of Eden Biologics, formerly known as JHL Biotech, as it works to grow its biologics CDMO.
If the JHL name sounds familiar, it should: the company, which rebranded as Eden last February, is the Taiwanese outfit at the center of a long-running trade secrets theft saga involving Roche’s Genentech.
The Eden acquisition comes after Bora in December linked up with Taishin Healthcare to jointly invest about $108 million to advance their capabilities in the CDMO and contract research organization industries. Bora, for its part, recently unveiled its biologics contract manufacturing platform, Bora Biologics.
"In order to effectively allocate resources, international pharmaceutical makers have moved towards specialization over the past few years, resulting in CDMO services becoming a trend sweeping the global biotech pharmaceutical sector,” Bobby Sheng, chairman of Bora Pharmaceuticals, said in a statement last year.
With Eden’s contract manufacturing facility in Hsinchu Biomedical Science Park, Taiwan, Bora will be able to “rapidly build a presence in the biological macromolecules and cell and gene therapy markets,” the company said.
The plant will allow Bora to access tech related to the development of cell lines to produce protein drugs, the development and analysis of upstream and downstream processes, plus cell bank generation.
The facility also comes equipped with four 500-liter bioreactors, Bora vice president Simon Chen said in a statement.
In March, meanwhile, Racho Jordanov, co-founder and former CEO at JHL, and Rose Lin, another co-founder and the company’s ex-chief operating officer, were sentenced to a year and a day in prison after being indicted on multiple counts including money laundering and obstruction to justice.`
By pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit trade secrets theft and wire fraud in August, Jordanov and Lin were able to get the remaining charges dismissed.
Jordanov and Lin’s guilty plea came shortly after that of Xanthe Lam, a former Genentech principal scientist, who, along with her husband, admitted to conspiring to steal trade secrets from the Roche subsidiary to help JHL develop cheap copycats of Genentech’s top-selling cancer meds Rituxan, Herceptin and Avastin, plus cystic fibrosis drug Pulmozyme.