As­traZeneca is break­ing ground on a multi­bil­lion-dol­lar API fa­cil­i­ty in Albe­mar­le Coun­ty, VA, mak­ing it the lat­est com­pa­ny to start build­ing af­ter Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump threat­ened 100% tar­iffs on drug­mak­ers not start­ing con­struc­tion in the US.

The orig­i­nal val­ue of the fa­cil­i­ty was $4 bil­lion, but the com­pa­ny said Thurs­day it was in­creas­ing its in­vest­ment to $4.5 bil­lion, ac­cord­ing to a press re­lease. The build is part of As­traZeneca’s $50 bil­lion pledge to the US, which it an­nounced in Ju­ly.

The Vir­ginia site will man­u­fac­ture drug sub­stances for As­traZeneca’s meta­bol­ic port­fo­lio, in­clud­ing for its oral GLP-1 drug bax­dro­stat and its oral PC­SK9 in­hibitor. It will al­so house man­u­fac­tur­ing for As­traZeneca’s an­ti­body drug con­ju­gates.

The fa­cil­i­ty will be op­er­a­tional in the next four to five years and will cre­ate 600 new jobs, the com­pa­ny said in the re­lease.

SEVILLE, SPAIN — Al­tos Labs has raised bil­lions of dol­lars and hunt­ed uni­ver­si­ty de­part­ments for star re­searchers to de­vel­op ther­a­pies that de­lay or rewind ag­ing. But the four-year-old start­up has said lit­tle about what it's us­ing all of that mon­ey or tal­ent for.

On Thurs­day at a med­ical con­fer­ence in Spain, the star­tup's found­ing sci­en­tist, Juan Car­los Izpisua Bel­monte, pro­vid­ed a glimpse in­to how the com­pa­ny thinks about ag­ing, and how it plans to stall it.

Al­tos is work­ing on “par­tial re­pro­gram­ming” ther­a­pies that can wind back the bi­o­log­i­cal clock and re­ju­ve­nate cells with­out go­ing so far back that they turn in­to blank-slate stem cells. That much was al­ready known. But he al­so re­vealed that Al­tos is test­ing those ex­per­i­men­tal re­pro­gram­ming ther­a­pies in or­gans that have been re­moved from the body and kept alive on a ma­chine that per­fus­es life-sus­tain­ing flu­ids through the or­gans.

Biotech IPOs ap­pear to be mak­ing a come­back.

Au­toim­mune biotech Evom­mune on Thurs­day be­came the lat­est com­pa­ny to flash its IPO plans, fil­ing its prospec­tus to go pub­lic on the New York Stock Ex­change as “EVMN.”

It would fol­low LB Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal­s' $285 mil­lion Nas­daq de­but last month and Map­Light’s pro­posed $227 mil­lion list­ing this month. Pri­or to LB’s float, there hadn’t been a siz­able US biotech IPO since Feb­ru­ary. In­vest­ment sen­ti­ment has picked up in re­cent weeks with mul­ti­ple large fi­nanc­ings, a se­ries of multi­bil­lion-dol­lar ac­qui­si­tions and an in­ter­est rate cut.

Pa­lo Al­to-based Evom­mune has two ex­per­i­men­tal med­i­cines in Phase 2 tri­als across a va­ri­ety of au­toim­mune con­di­tions. It is led by CEO Luis Peña, who was chief de­vel­op­ment of­fi­cer at Der­mi­ra when Eli Lil­ly ac­quired it for $1.1 bil­lion in 2020.

Ot­su­ka Pre­ci­sion Health, a sub­sidiary of the drug­mak­er Ot­su­ka that's fo­cused on dig­i­tal health, has ac­quired Mind­ful Ma­mas, a ma­ter­nal men­tal well­ness start­up of&sh