Grifols SA says it will spend $351.6 million to build a plasma facility and logistics center in Clayton, North Carolina. The investment – which was announced by the office of North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper – will create 300 jobs when the facility is operational. Operations at the new site will be focused on fractionation, the process of separating different components from blood plasma harvested from donors across the US. Grifols said the additional capacity will help cater for growing…
The $150 million facility in The Netherlands is now fully operational and will produce CAR-T therapy Yescarta for up to 4,000 patients per year, says Kite. In 2018, Gilead Sciences, fresh from its $11.9 billion acquisition of Kite Pharma, announced plans to open a European facility to manufacture chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies. Today the firm has announced the 204,514 square-foot site – the largest in Kite’s network – has received approval from the European Medicine Agency (EMA) for…
Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies will increase bioreactor capacity to 240,000 L at the recently acquired site in Denmark, feeding the high demand for biomanufacturing services. In March 2019, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies (FDB) announced plans to buy a mammalian cell culture manufacturing facility in Hillerød, Denmark from biopharma firm Biogen. In August, the firms completed the $890 million deal. The acquisition was the largest investment both in terms of financials and in terms of capacity for the Fujifilm Corporation subsidiary, but 10…
Chinese CDMO WuXi Biologics has entered a ten-year lease on a clinical biomanufacturing facility in New Jersey weeks after securing a production site in Massachusetts. The contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) announced yesterday it has signed a 10-year lease agreement for a clinical manufacturing facility in Cranbury, New Jersey. The 66,000 square-foot plant, expected to be operational later this year, will house 6,000 L of single-use bioreactors, a WuXi Biologics spokesperson told us, as well as process development (PD)…
Achilles Therapeutics will produce clinical material for its personalized T cell candidate from the Cell & Gene Therapy (CGT) Catapult. The Stevenage, UK-based CGT Catapult – established by non-departmental government body Innovate UK in 2017 to support the burgeoning sector – recently completed an expansion, adding six clean rooms. The first company to take manufacturing in this expanded space is Achilles Therapeutics, which is developing autologous cell therapies against advanced non-small cell lung cancer and recurrent metastatic melanoma. Using T…
AGC Biologics has expanded its CDMO operations by acquiring a mothballed commercial-scale manufacturing facility from AstraZeneca and says it will hire 150 staff going forward. In January 2019, Anglo-Swedish firm AstraZeneca announced the closure of two Colorado-based biomanufacturing facilities acquired in 2015 and 2016 from fellow pharma giant Amgen. The decision to close the sites in Longmont and Boulder formed part of a plan to consolidate its biologics manufacturing network into one large-scale drug substance facility at its site in…
Thermo Fisher will take over operations at CSL’s biomanufacturing site in Lengnau – currently under construction – adding 12,000 L of stainless-steel bioreactor capacity to its CDMO network. CSL Behring broke ground on the 1.5 million square-foot site in Lengnau, near Bern in Switzerland back in 2015, with plans to use the facilities to manufacture recombinant products, specifically in its hematology pipeline. At the time, the firm, which invested approximately CHF 1 billion ($1 billion) into the project, said the…
Meissner says the production of single-use systems has begun from its newly-established site in County Mayo, Ireland. The filtration firm announced in February 2019 plans to establish a production site in Castlebar, Ireland to support demand for its single-use products form the biopharma industry. Sixteen months on and the facility has begun supplying the space after a 10,000 square-foot ISO class 7 cleanroom was completed in mid-April. With the current COVID-19 crisis still ongoing, there was no ribbon-cutting ceremony. “This…
The Novartis gene therapy business will contribute its technology and dedicated space at a facility run by CDMO Catalent to help produce a COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Massachusetts-based researchers. Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Massachusetts General Hospital have teamed to develop a vaccine candidate that uses an adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector to deliver and express the Spike gene of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, to elicit an immune response. The developers have turned to AveXis, the gene therapy division…
Gamida Cell will initiate a BLA submission for lead cell therapy omidubicel later this year and grow inhouse manufacturing capabilities to support production of cancer candidate GDA-201. Israeli cell therapy company Gamida Cell raised $60 million (€55 million) last week through a public share offering. The money will be used to support the approval application and manufacturing capabilities of its cell therapy products, the firm said on an investor call last week. Lead candidate omidubicel – formerly known as NiCord…