The Scottish company offers a range of development and manufacturing services for recombinant proteins, monoclonal antibodies, biosimilars, regenerative medicine, gene therapy vectors and vaccines. The opening of this new facility will create about 50 new jobs in the next six months.
“Our opening of this new, state-of-the-art facility demonstrates our commitment to our growing list of global customers,” said BioOutsource CEO Gerry MacKay. “Demand for our services remains high and we are doubling our capacity to make sure we are ready to support the robust pipeline of biotech and biosimilar products currently in development.”
The company’s current partnerships and clients include work with Actavis Biologics, Oncobiologics and MediWound.
Spokeswoman Gemma Fulton told us the company is seeing particularly strong growth in the characterization and comparability testing services it provides for biosimilar drug candidates.
The company offers off-the-shelf assay packages to complete a comparability study for the biological characterisation of a range of biosimilar molecules, including for Herceptin (trastuzumab), Humira (adalimumab), Enbrel (etanercept), Remicade (infliximab) and others. In addition, the company supports biosafety testing, lot release and stability and development of custom Phase III host cell protein assays.
“As biopharma companies expand their focus on biosimilars, the requirement for off-the-shelf assays to rapidly characterise the candidate molecules in their pipelines has increased,” Fulton added.
The new Scottish facility comes three months after the company was acquired by Sartorius Stedim Biotech. And a little more than a year ago, BioOutsource expanded into the US with a new Cambridge, Massachusetts sales office. The company told us that it’s seeing its highest growth in biosimilar testing come from the US market.
The company currently employs about 80 others and reported annual revenues of around $10m last year.