Wednesday, November 3, 2021 Daily Archives

Lonza bags Codiak’s exosome plant in $65m deal

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Lonza has acquired an exosome manufacturing facility in Lexington, Massachusetts from Codiak BioSciences, which will keep its pipeline of therapeutic candidates. “Exosomes are extracellular vesicles excreted by cells into the surrounding fluids with a diameter between 30 and 150 nanometers,†Senthil Ramaswamy, executive director of Cell and Gene Technologies R&D, Lonza told us. “They represent a form of cell-to-cell communication. Cells can exchange metabolites, genetic information, and proteins through exosomes. The membrane-bound structure of exosomes allows for loading with various…

November 3, 2021

With quality issues fixed, Takeda preps Hikari plant for COVID vax production

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Having in-licensed a COVID-19 vaccine from Novavax, Takeda will manufacture up to 250 million doses per year from its Hikari, Japan facility, freshly absolved by the US FDA. In June 2020, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued Takeda’s Hikari facility – located 40 km southwest of Hiroshima – a warning letter after inspectors identified issues with the plant’s Quality Unit (QU), including concerns about how the firm investigated unexplained discrepancy and batch failures – specifically the detection of…

November 3, 2021

Swedish CGT sector is growing but talent shortage must be addressed, says SwedenBIO

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BioProcess Insider spoke with SwedenBIO CEO Helena StrigÃ¥rd about the cell and gene therapy industry in Sweden and its future.   StrigÃ¥rd has been at the private non-profit organization firm SwedenBIO for four years and discusses its focus on driving the cell and gene therapy (CGT) sector in Sweden, the challenges it faces, and her predictions for the future. BioProcess Insider (BI): Is there a trend you are seeing in the CGT space in Sweden? Helena StrigÃ¥rd (HS): We see a…

November 3, 2021