NightHawk Biosciences, an integrated contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), is changing the name of the company to Scorpius Holdings, Inc. to better reflect the company’s shift into a pure-play, large molecule biomanufacturing CDMO. The company will continue to operate its CDMO within the Scorpius BioManufacturing subsidiary. 

In addition, the company promoted Brian O’Mara to vice president of process sciences and Steve Lavezoli to vice president of commercial operations. It has also named Juan Lagos senior director of cell-based technologies and Ania Szymanska site head of quality.

O’Mara joined Scorpius in June 2022 as the senior director, manufacturing science & technology. He has more than 20 years of industrial biotechnology experience in downstream process development of early- and late-stage protein therapeutics from mammalian and microbial expression systems. 

Lavezoli joined Scorpius in December 2022 as the regional vice president of business development for the central region. He now oversees Scorpius’ business development, proposals, and marketing strategy. He brings extensive experience in various roles throughout business development and marketing. He spent 12 years in the industrial gasses industry with Linde Gas, as well as W.L. Gore in their startup biopharmaceutical division working on a commercial business/market development role for bulk drug substance single-use items. 

Lagos brings more than 20 years of experience in cell culture and upstream process development from lab bench to cGMP manufacturing and leads Scorpius’ cell-based technologies team, which is responsible for analytical and cell therapy processes. Before joining Scorpius, he was the associate director MS&T / LVV suspension process development at Rocket Pharmaceuticals. 

Szymanska brings over 19 years of leadership and management experience in Quality Control, Quality Assurance, and Compliance at pharmaceutical and biotech companies. She joined Scorpius from Marker Therapeutics, Inc. where she was Vice President of Quality and built the Quality Management Systems. She played a critical role in the design, construction, and qualification of their state-of-the-art cell therapy GMP manufacturing facility and quality control laboratories. 

Jeff Wolf, CEO of Nighthawk, said, “Our rebranding to Scorpius Holdings is a testament to our successful transition and the growth of our CDMO operations. The industry faces a critical shortage of clinical-scale biologic manufacturing capacity, driven by increasing demand for large molecule CDMO services. Our state-of-the-art facility in San Antonio, Texas ideally positions us to address this gap in CDMO manufacturing capacity and services. The response from major biotech companies and leading research institutions to our CDMO capabilities has been positive, as evidenced by the expansion of our sales pipeline.”