Spokeswoman Melanie Disa told Outsourcing-pharma.com that Lonza has added a new cGMP (current good manufacturing practice) standard kilo-lab and a small scale active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) production line.
She added that “The motivation for the expansion was to provide increased flexibility for our customers to be able to more quickly respond to customer needs for clinical material.
The investment is in keeping with comments the Switzerland-based supplier made last month when it reported that strong demand for APIs and chemical intermediates produced at the Nansha facility was the key growth driver for its custom manufacturing business.
Plasmid DNA production platform
In other manufacturing news Lonza has launched a new microbial-based development and production platform for plasmid DNA vaccines and therapeutics.
The technology – available at the firm’s facilities in Hopkinton in the US and Visp in Switzerland – combines fermentation, primary recovery and purification to produce plasmid DNA in an approach that, Lonza claims, is faster than other methods.
Lonza also claims that the strain of Escherichia coli used for production – which was created by Scarab Genomics LLC – has a genome that is 15 per cent smaller than the K-12 strain from which it was developed.
The significance of this is that the ‘Clean Genome’ organism lacks the insertion sequences that can – by switching position in the genome during fermentation – impact on the quality of the pDNA that is produced.