EirGenix Inc (台康生技), a contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) and biosimilars maker, on Tuesday last week opened a state-of-the-art protein production facility at the Hsinchu Biomedical Park that it said would boost its CDMO capabilities.
The facility has one production line equipped with two 2,000 liter single-use bioreactors, but there is room to fit a total of two production lines of three 2,000 liter bioreactors each, EirGenix said.
Mass production tests are scheduled for March, the company said.
When both production lines are ready, the company would have annual protein drug output of 1,000kg to support its goals of fully localizing production.
The added capacity would boost EirGenix’s own proprietary drug development, including EG12014, its breast cancer drug that is a biosimilar to trastuzumab, which in May last year gained phase III clinical trial approval, as well as its late-stage CDMO business, company president and CEO Liu Lee-cheng (劉理成) said.
The company on Tuesday inked a three-way partnership with parent company Formosa Laboratories Inc (台耀化學) and Spain’s Oncomatryx Biopharma SL to develop an antibody drug conjugate to treat pancreatic cancer.
It has enrolled 13 out of 800 patients required for the EG12014 trial and expects to achieve full enrollment by the end of this year, Liu said, adding that final studies on the drug would be completed before next year and it should gain marketing approval in 2021 or 2022.
Founded in 2012, the company is one of the few Taiwanese CDMO service providers that has completed more than 10 contracts with major international customers, Liu said, adding that its revenue and licensing income have grown 35 times and 17-fold respectively since then.
Revenue could jump to NT$500 million (US$16.22 million) this year, up from NT$280 million last year as the CDMO business is no longer capacity-constrained, EirGenix said.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to