The 1500m2 Welsh manufacturing facility is set to come online mid-2017, offering ADC process development, manufacturing and quality testing services to drug developers.
The company said the investment was driven by a shortage of clinical manufacturing capacity for such services as drugmakers look to bring more ADCs into the clinic, and comes as the first stage of a two-part expansion strategy which will see the firm add a further 2,500m2 of production space.
Over 60 new jobs will be created across the two expansion phases at the site in St Asaph, North Wales.
With the firm citing that the ADC clinical trial contract manufacturing industry could triple in size to $150m by 2018, CEO Charlie Johnson said: “ADC manufacturing at larger scales is a fast-emerging global market opportunity.”
He added ADC Bio was hoping to capitalise on this using its ‘Lock-Release’ enabling technology which can help reduce future production costs of these drugs.
The platform works by covalently ‘locking’ an antibody to solid polymer beads, prior to conjugation, releasing them as a clean drug substance. It can then be conjugated with a payload before being released from the bead bond using an additive acting as a chemical ‘key,’ leaving an ADC ready for downstream processing.
According to the company, the tech can help eliminate several steps in the conjugation process while reducing the amount of processing equipment and the process risks associated with ADC manufacture.
There are currently just two ADCs available in Europe: Roche's Kadcyla (trastuzumab emtansine) and Seattle Genetics's Adcetris (brentuximab vedotin).