Gilead says it is committed to driving down costs of CAR-T manufacturing after agreeing to buy late-stage cell and gene therapy firm KitePharma for $11.9bn.
Oxford BioMedica saw its share price jump 21% after the US FDA approved Kymriah, the gene modified cell therapy made with the firm’s lentiviral vectors.
Industry is feeling the low yield and high cost limitations of the CHO cell line and must look to alternatives to make next-generation biological products, says fungal-based protein expression firm Dyadic International.
Oxford Genetics will expand its bioproduction services in the UK and target the US market through an office in Boston after receiving a £7.5m ($9.6m) investment.
Agilent Technologies says it is benefitting from increased antibody and biosimilar R&D and manufacturing, reporting a double-digit growth for its third quarter.
Bioprocessing suppliers have recently expressed optimism in the sector despite a slowdown in growth, and one expert believes this will drive investment in new tech and markets.
Modular facilities and single-use systems are fast becoming a standard part of the bioproduction infrastructure as industry looks to mitigate future capacity constraints.
Seattle Genetics paid Bristol-Myers Squibb $17.8m for the biomanufacturing site and says it will spend a further $25.5m on equipment and improvements to support antibody production.
Pall Corporation has developed a control system for its single-use benchtop bioreactor and says it will continue to invest in-house for process control technologies.
Supply chain issues stemming from an FDA warning letter at a facility run by its partner Lonza have dampened Sartorius Stedim Biotech’s first half 2017 results.
Researchers at the University of Alberta, Canada say a synthetic version of the extinct horsepox virus could yield more efficient protein expression systems and better vaccines.
ABEC says its latest offering has twice the working volume of the 2,000L bioreactor systems generally deemed to be the upper limit in single-use bioprocessing.
Shire will consolidate both R&D and biomanufacturing facilities in Massachusetts to establish a rare diseases hub in Cambridge and a ‘Technology Center of Excellence’ in Lexington.
Lonza will install four 2,000L single-use bioreactors at its Singapore facility to cater for growing demand for small to mid-volume biologics production.
Takeda says it is assessing manufacturing options ahead of potential European approval later this year of the Crohn’s disease stem cell therapy licensed from TiGenix.
Ireland’s “thriving biopharma industry” has traditionally employed large-scale bioreactors, however a new wave of biologics with changing production requirements is changing the trend, say industry representatives.
The National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT) has teamed up with GE Healthcare and opened a single-use focused training facility in Dublin, Ireland.
Horizon Discovery will add vector and transposase technology to its gene editing services through a cross-licensing partnership with gene and protein expression services firm ATUM.
Sartorius Stedim Biotech (SSB) has announced it will combine technologies with US-based cell culture analysers Nova Biomedical, as a result of increased customer demand.
Dr Reddy’s will expand its biosimilar manufacturing capacity in Hyderabad by 4,000L using GE Healthcare’s FlexFactory platform based on single-use technologies.
Xeno-free and cGMP-manufactured media are highly desired by cell therapy developers, says Irvine Scientific as it launches a medium for hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs).
Stelis Biopharma has partnered with Germany’s Merck on a bioprocessing services centre in Bangalore and says single-use systems could kickstart India’s biomanufacturing sector.
A WuXi Biologics facility tipped to be the world’s largest single-use mammalian cell culture site will be equipped with disposable systems from Thermo Fisher.
A second single-use production line could offer commercial-scale capacity for bispecific antibodies but Glenmark says it would need to scale-up further to support more traditional biologics.
Avid Bioservices will add multiple MilliporeSigma 2,000L bioreactors at its Californian single-use production plant in an effort to its increase annual revenue to over $100m.
An inconsistent lot of excipient Poloxamer 188 cut biologic yield 30%, but working with supplier BASF was key to prevent future problems, according to Roche.
Dutch contract manufacturer PharmaCell B.V has signed a three-year Manufacturing Services Agreement to make cancer cell therapies for Lion Biotechnologies.