The surge in interest towards the development of cell and gene therapies is creating a serious capacity issue. GE Healthcare Life Sciences has announced that it will build a new space in Grens, Switzerland, as it looks to cater to this increased demand.
The main focus of the 7,360-square-meter facility will be the manufacture of single-use kits for its Sepax and Sefia cell processing systems. However, it will also house a ‘Center of Excellence’ that will include cell and gene therapy manufacturing facilities, as well as housing an R&D team.
GE Healthcare expects the facility to be fully operational in 2022 and to employ around 200 people.
In terms of how much the company will be investing in the site, a spokesperson stated that such detail will not be made public.
However, on the location, the spokesperson provided the reasoning: “The decision to build the new facility in Grens was based on several factors including talent retention, the availability of a highly skilled workforce that enables growth and proximity to key suppliers.”
Alongside the announcement, Emmanuel Ligner, CEO of GE Healthcare Life Sciences, stated that the number of regenerative companies worldwide, which is in excess of 900, makes such an investment a sensible one, and that the new facility would allow the company to ‘accelerate capacity’.
In addition, the spokesperson added that the facility will allow the company to scale the facility as demand increases.
In a previous interview with BioPharma-Reporter, Ligner told us that it is necessary to adapt to the industry, particularly to adjust its products to demand from gene therapies or for chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T therapies. With a global pipeline bursting with cell and gene therapies, GE Healthcare are placing a bet on this to be a major source of growth into the future.
