The facility will be the second of its kind and the first in Europe (with the first being opened last August in Redmond, WA in the US). It will employ the J.POD technology from its subsidiary Just-Evotec to create commercial manufacturing capacity for biologics.
Traditional fed-batch biologics manufacturing presents significant challenges, especially at the upscaling from clinical to commercial supply.
However, thanks to its modular continuous manufacturing setup, the J.POD tech allows for ‘highly intensified cGMP manufacturing of biologics at flexibly scalable quantities, thus reducing both scale-up risks and manufacturing costs significantly,' according to Evotec.
The new facility is expected to be operational in H2 2024 and will create more than 150 new high-skill jobs at the campus.
Dr Craig Johnstone, Chief Operating Officer of Evotec, said: “The ground-breaking for J.POD Toulouse marks an important milestone on our path to making biologics globally available. J.POD is a disruptive technology that makes biologics manufacturing not only scalable, but even more importantly, available right where they are needed.”
The construction of the facility benefits from French government funding as part of the Investments for the Future Program (programme d’investissements d’avenir) and is also supported economically by the Occitanie Region and Toulouse Métropole.