In January, GE Healthcare and G-CON announced that they would combine capabilities to offer prefabricated manufacturing platforms. The partnership arrived shortly after GE Healthcare worked with Lonza to set up a biologics facility in China.
Greg Crescenzi, enterprise solutions leader for cell & gene therapy at GE Healthcare, told us that partnerships are an important strategy for contract manufacturing organisations (CMOs) to meet demand.
Crescenzi explained that 40% year-on-year growth seen in the sector throws up new challenges, including how to supply the industry when related technology is developing rapidly.
“We must anticipate what therapeutic manufacturing models will look like in two to three years and design tools and pursue partnerships that will allow us to meet manufacturing needs,” he explained.
According to Crescenzi, this was the motivation behind the partnership with G-CON, by enabling a unique offering of a single, ready-made facility to provide the materials needed to progress drug candidates from the clinical trial stage to commercialisation.
“It provides customers with an entire cleanroom infrastructure from a single source and will improve and accelerate cell therapy and viral manufacturing on a good manufacturing practice (GMP) scale,” he said.
