Ab­b­Vie has pro­vid­ed new de­tails about its $100 bil­lion pledge to the US, bud­get­ing $1.4 bil­lion for its first man­u­fac­tur­ing cam­pus in North Car­oli­na.

Con­struc­tion of the 185-acre cam­pus in Durham, NC, will start this year with the aim of fin­ish­ing by late 2028, be­fore the end of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s term.

The White House has re­cent­ly pushed drug­mak­ers to fin­ish con­struc­tion of their pledged fa­cil­i­ties dur­ing Trump's tenure, oth­er­wise they could face tar­iffs. Com­pa­nies cur­rent­ly build­ing in the US face 20% tar­iffs, but this will in­crease to 100% if the builds aren't com­plet­ed by Jan­u­ary 2029.

The cam­pus, lo­cat­ed near Re­search Tri­an­gle Park, will use ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence to man­u­fac­ture Ab­b­Vie's im­munol­o­gy, neu­ro­science and on­col­o­gy drugs, ac­cord­ing to the Wednes­day re­lease. The site will cre­ate 734 new jobs.

Bio­vac’s new vac­cine fac­to­ry in Cape Town, which is ex­pect­ed to make up to 400 mil­lion vac­cines per year, has se­cured fi­nanc­ing from the Eu­ro­pean In­vest­ment Bank, the Eu­ro­pean Com­mis­sion and the In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nance Cor­po­ra­tion.

The to­tal cost of the fa­cil­i­ty will be $180 mil­lion, Bio­vac’s CEO More­na Makhoana told End­points News in an email. The fac­to­ry will be lo­cat­ed at Bio­vac's cam­pus in Pinelands, Cape Town.

The fa­cil­i­ty will ini­tial­ly make oral cholera vac­cines and will ex­pand in­to po­lio, pneu­mo­nia and menin­gi­tis vac­cines. Once com­plet­ed, the site will pro­duce be­tween 30 and 40 mil­lion cholera vac­cine dos­es per year, which will ad­dress around 40% of the glob­al cholera vac­cine sup­ply gap.

The Cen­ters for Medicare and Med­ic­aid Ser­vices has de­layed a key pi­lot pro­gram fo­cused on Medicare cov­er­age for obe­si­ty med­ica­tions, af­ter in­sur­ance plans in­di­cat­ed they wouldn’t par­tic­i­pate at this time.

Abe Sut­ton, head of the Cen­ter for Medicare and Med­ic­aid In­no­va­tion, told End­points News in an in­ter­view Thurs­day that health plans were hes­i­tant to join the pi­lot, cit­ing in­sta­bil­i­ty in the Medicare Part D mar­ket and un­known uti­liza­tion of the drugs.

“They shared with us that it was im­por­tant that we take a beat and give them a chance to col­lect da­ta so that they could un­der­write this ef­fec­tive­ly in a fu­ture time pe­ri­od,” Sut­ton said.

Plus, news about Avonik, a sup­ply chain trans­paren­cy bill and Nu­cle­us Ra­dio­Phar­ma:

💰 Am­neal Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals to ac­quire biosim­i­lar mak­er for $375M up­front: The gener­ics and spe­cial­ty drug­mak­er is set to buy Kashiv Bio­sciences in a deal that has up to $350 mil­lion in mile­stone pay­ments. The trans­ac­tion is ex­pect­ed to close in the sec­ond half of the year.

🇰🇷 Sam­sung Bio re­ports Q1 rev­enue as work­ers ral­ly: Sam­sung Bi­o­log­ics on Wednes­day said it pulled in 1.3 tril­lion Ko­re­an won ($878 mil­lion) in rev­enue for the first quar­ter of 2026, up 26% from the same pe­ri­od last year. The CD­MO said the rev­enue uptick was dri­ven by full “uti­liza­tion” across its Plants 1 through 4. The re­port comes as the CD­MO’s la­bor union held a 2,200-per­son ral­ly on the same day over wage ne­go­ti­a­tions. Work­ers will strike on May 1 if Sam­sung Bio’s man­age­ment con­tin­ues to re­ject ne­go­ti­a­tions, the union said in a state­ment.

LON­DON – Boehringer In­gel­heim is grow­ing its ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence arm to the UK by build­ing a new hub in cen­tral Lon­don and in­vest­ing £150 mil­lion over the next 10 years.

The AI hub will be in the Knowl­edge Quar­ter in King’s Cross, which is al­so home to AI units for oth­er drug­mak­ers like BioN­Tech and No­vo Nordisk. The area is al­so a key lo­ca­tion for com­pa­nies like Ope­nAI, Google, Meta and Benev­o­len­tAI.

Once com­plete, the Ger­man drug­mak­er’s AI hub will fo­cus on very ear­ly dis­ease bi­ol­o­gy, Nico­la Rich­mond, Boehringer’s head of AI and ma­chine learn­ing, told End­points News in an in­ter­view. “The vi­sion is that we build AI foun­da­tion­al ca­pa­bil­i­ties that help our sci­en­tists bet­ter un­der­stand dis­ease,” she added.

A new HIV treat­ment will soon come to mar­ket, and it will spear­head Mer­ck’s at­tempt to be one of the lead­ing drug­mak­ers in a field many biotechs have de­sert­ed.

The FDA green­lit Mer­ck’s once-dai­ly pill for adults with HIV-1 who are vi­ro­log­i­cal­ly sup­pressed, as a re­place­ment for their cur­rent an­ti­retro­vi­ral reg­i­men. The US reg­u­la­tor ap­proved Id­vyn­so on Mon­day, ac­cord­ing to an up­date to the FDA data­base on Tues­day. It came a week in ad­vance of an April 28 PD