The plant – which cost €24m ($26m) - houses two 3,000 litre stainless steel bioreactors linked to a protein purification system. Clinical-stage protein therapeutics and commercial products will be made at the site.
Rentschler CEO Frank Mathias said: “An increase in sales of over 30% in the past two years has enabled us to make this significant investment. We have already received manufacturing orders for the new facility, extending into 2018.”
He added that: “Increasingly, our growth is being driven by international business, with more and more orders coming from abroad, particularly the United States."
Rentschler also said it plans to hire 200 employees, explaining this will include process engineers and laboratory technicians in bioprocess development and manufacturing as well as GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) experts, as it continues to expand its business.
Expansion
The new facility is the second expansion Rentschler has undertaken in a year. In April last year the German contract manufacturing organisation (CMO) installed a single-use bioreactor at its older facility at the Laupheim site.
That expansion coincided with Rentschler being contracted to make Apeiron’s neuroblastoma candidate monoclonal antibody (mAb) APN311.
A few months later the CMO was hired by Probiodrug to makes its Alzheimer’s disease drug candidate PBD-C06, a pGlu-Abeta-specific mAb.