The company signed a lease on a new facility in Sorrento Valley near San Diego, California. The lease includes an option to expand further dependent on future growth.
David Weber, chief commercial officer of Maravai, told us that the main driver behind this relocation was the demand for product outpacing the company’s current capacity. “It’s pretty simple, we’re just wearing a pair of pants that are too tight, and when I say demand I mean demand for nucleic acid, DNA and RNA, complex products,” Weber explained.
Per the expansion, the company’s current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) production capabilities will be relocated, which Weber told us are also in high demand because of the number of gene therapy and nucleic acid-based treatments entering into Phase I and II clinical trials.
“All of those are at the forefront today and have a lot of visibility and initial success and potential future success, in terms of impacting human health,” Weber said.
The new facility can accommodate growth to more than 350 R&D, commercial and manufacturing employees from the company’s current 150 employees. Weber told us, “We expect employee growth to continue and, assuming demand continues at the pace of growth as it is now, we will likely have to take more space to accommodate more lab space, as well as more people.”
TriLink will move into half of the 180,000-square-foot building in the fall of 2019, with the relocation completed by the end of the year. Maravai told us that its growth has been occurring rapidly since the company acquired TriLink and made investments in it beginning in August 2016.
