At busy Visp site, Lonza will up microbial services by 50%

In an ef­fort to up its de­vel­op­ment of mi­cro­bial-de­rived pro­teins, Swiss CD­MO Lon­za will in­vest in its man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pac­i­ties in its home coun­try.

The ex­ten­sion will be good to go by the end of this year, the com­pa­ny said. The ex­pand­ed de­vel­op­ment will strength­en the up­stream, down­stream and process an­a­lyt­ics sup­port for new projects. The mi­cro­bial foot­print at its Visp site will be con­sol­i­dat­ed, and new high-through­put equip­ment and au­toma­tion process­es will be added to in­crease ef­fi­cien­cy and project de­liv­ery. That will in­clude three liq­uid han­dling work­sta­tions, and the up­grades will help im­prove da­ta gen­er­a­tion.

Vice Pres­i­dent Shi­va Kha­laf­pour said in a press re­lease:

‘The mi­cro­bial-de­rived pipeline is grow­ing at a healthy rate dri­ven by an in­crease in al­ter­na­tives to an­ti­bod­ies such as nanobod­ies, de­signed ankyrin re­peat pro­teins (DARPins), sin­gle-chain an­ti­bod­ies, etc. For some of these mol­e­cules, mi­cro­bial sys­tems show bet­ter and more ef­fi­cient pro­duc­tiv­i­ties, which is in­creas­ing the trend to­ward out­sourc­ing as cus­tomers need to re­ly on key mi­cro­bial ex­per­tise. Ex­pand­ing our de­vel­op­ment lab­o­ra­to­ries will en­able us to sup­port new cus­tomers with the de­vel­op­ment and man­u­fac­ture of these mol­e­cules and oth­er re­com­bi­nant pro­teins for both clin­i­cal and com­mer­cial projects.’

The ex­pan­sion will al­so fea­ture a new pi­lot suite with a 50L fer­menter that can gen­er­ate non-GMP prod­uct for for­mu­la­tion and tox­i­col­o­gy stud­ies, as well as new man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pac­i­ty that will be ready to op­er­ate in 2022.

In Sep­tem­ber, the com­pa­ny an­nounced man­u­fac­tur­ing in­vest­ments at three of its sites, in­clud­ing the Visp lo­ca­tion. It’s al­ready ex­pand­ed in Chi­na, New Hamp­shire and the Nether­lands as well, to help sup­port its dou­bling of mR­NA drug sub­stance man­u­fac­tur­ing, as it has worked close­ly with Mod­er­na. At one point, Lon­za called up­on fed­er­al work­ers and some from lo­cal uni­ver­si­ties to sup­ple­ment its work­force in Visp, even bor­row­ing work­ers from food gi­ant Nestlé, cov­er­ing food, salary, trav­el and lodg­ing for about 75 work­ers while it looked for a long-term so­lu­tion to its staffing woes.

The com­pa­ny al­so an­nounced a man­u­fac­tur­ing part­ner­ship with Blue­Jay last week, a de­vel­op­er of ther­a­peu­tics to treat he­pati­tis B in­fec­tion. The deal will al­low Lon­za to make BJT-778, one of the com­pa­ny’s lead can­di­dates, an mAb that tar­gets the sur­face anti­gen HB­sAg. The agree­ment will cov­er the ear­ly stages from gene man­u­fac­tur­ing to IND, and pro­vide cell line, process and an­a­lyt­i­cal de­vel­op­ment at the Visp, Basel and Stein, Chi­na sites.

Jee­tendra Vaghjiani, the ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment and strate­gic mar­ket­ing, said in a press re­lease:

‘This col­lab­o­ra­tion sig­ni­fies our com­mit­ment and flex­i­bil­i­ty in ac­com­mo­dat­ing the spe­cif­ic and unique needs of emerg­ing biotechs tak­ing their lead can­di­date to clin­ic. Our team has ex­ten­sive ex­per­tise to set up a cus­tomized for­mu­la­tion plat­form, proac­tive­ly an­tic­i­pate risks and sug­gest mit­i­ga­tion mea­sures that will help move Blue­Jay’s can­di­date from pre­clin­i­cal stages in­to the clin­ic.’

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