Trump admin taps startup to build nation’s first stockpile of key drug ingredients – By Didi Martinez and Brenda Breslauer (NBC News) / May 19 2020
The $354 million project is designed to shore up the drug supply chain and reduce the country’s dependence on foreign manufacturers.
Seeking to secure the nation’s supply of critical medications, the Trump administration has signed a $354 million contract that would create the nation’s first strategic stockpile of key ingredients needed to make medicines.
The agreement was signed Monday with Phlow Corp., a generic drug maker based in Virginia. According to a news release to be made public Tuesday, the project will use federal funds from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority under the Department of Health and Human Services.
The goal is twofold: to enable the U.S. to manufacture essential drugs at risk of shortage and to create a reserve of active pharmaceutical ingredients to reduce the dependence on foreign suppliers.
Phlow’s CEO, Dr. Eric Edwards, told NBC News that the company had been in discussions with the administration back in November but that the project was fast-tracked once COVID-19 hit.
“We said: ‘We have a short-term and long-term solution. We know that there are certain key essential generic medicines that are going to go into shortage if this thing starts spreading,'” Edwards said. “There were drugs that were already on the FDA drug shortage list long before COVID-19 and we already saw what was happening with PPE, and we knew this was going to be as bad or even worse.”
Continue to article: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-admin-taps-startup-build-nation-s-first-stockpile-key-n1210011
