The UK company is looking to expand bioconjugation activities at its Deeside facility, as part of its “overarching corporate strategy.”
This involved securing funds of £2.5m ($3.2m) from existing investors, building upon capital raised earlier this year.
ADC Bio’s CEO, Charlie Johnson, told us that creating the plans for downstream activities will take three months to complete and will then be reviewed by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.
In addition to manufacturing plans, the company will invest in its Lock-Release technology, which Johnson explained could reduce timelines for antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) manufacture: “The ultimate goal is to reduce the manufacturing critical path down by six months or more. This could be achieved by using Lock-Release trains to pull antibody from crude mAb harvest supernatant and carry out conversion to ADC whilst immobilised on the resins.”
“Subsequent viral inactivation, filtration and polishing steps would then be carried out on the final ADC rather than the mAb intermediate, as is the current convention. This will save months of time and costs associated with removing expensive protein A resins and duplications in analytical development and testing,” he continued.
Responding to the market
Johnson explained that the expansion plans were fuelled by industry showing “more interest in the ADC area”.
Johnson noted that the increase of interest in ADCs has been partly fuelled by the exploration of their use outside of oncology, into other areas such as inflammatory disease and for antimicrobial targets.
This is reflected in other actions seen in the industry; last month, Lonza announced that it would expand two of its ADC manufacturing sites to be able to produce all components necessary to produce the compounds for clients.
In June, WuXi Biologics also began building a $20m (€17.6m) manufacturing centre for ADCs in China.
