The new laboratory, which is located in its manufacturing facility in Bloomington, Minnesota, is modelled after the facility the firm set up in Brussels, Belgium in 2006 to try and drum up business for its range of Integrity iCellis and Xpansion bioreactors.
Like the Brussels site the Bloomington lab will also provide customers with support services, which will include a 15-strong team of scientists that will advise on bioprocess development and implementation as ATMI general manager Mario Phillips explained.
“The laboratory is fully equipped with ATMI technologies and equipment to perform cell culture, and it is staffed by experts in the field.
Phillips added that: “The team at this site has extensive experience in cell culture bioprocesses development and scale-up, as well as more than 20 protein, virus and cell production processes that have been developed in ATMI's proprietary bioreactors.”
US use of single use
The decision to start offering testing and development services for single-use biomanufacturing techs to customers in North America fits with what ATMI told in-Pharmatechnologist.com when we visited the firm’s Belgium facility earlier in the year.
Spokesman Eric Isberg told us that, unlike their European counterparts, biomanufacturing firms in the US have been slow to adopt single-use production technologies and switch from the stainless steel technologies with which they are more familiar.
He told us that: “Europe is ahead of the US in terms of innovation and single-use."
Isberg also predicted that if Asian firms start to embrace single-use technology for drug production, manufacturers in North American would also be forced to adopted it.