The German contract manufacturer now has the capacity to produce commercial supplies of therapeutic proteins, such as cytokines, and monoclonal antibodies.
"The facility extension will allow us to both satisfy the demand for Phase III materials and establish Rentschler as a market supplier of antibodies and high-dosage drugs," Wieland Wolf, Rentschler spokesperson, told Outsourcing-Pharma.com.
The new fermenter lines have a 500 litre working volume each which means that different cell culture processes (batch, fed-batch or perfusion) can be run in the same bioreactor.
The first bioreactor is ready to use and the second will be in the next few weeks, another company spokesperson told Outsourcing-Pharma.com.
The firm is also building two new fermentation suites, each with a volume of 2500L, to manufacture commercial quantities of antibodies, with the first expected to be up and running in mid-2008.
The expansion project, being carried out at the company's existing site in Laupheim, Germany, was announced exactly a year ago, and Rentschler has already secured several contracts with biopharma companies that will use the new bioreactors.
However, the company could not reveal the name of the companies nor any financial details of the new deals.
Rentschler's main customer is US-based Maxygen for which it manufactures a novel factor VIIa protein therapeutic co-developed by Maxygen and Swiss drug maker Roche for a number of clinical applications.
The company recently opened a sales office in New Jersey, US in a bid to further develop its North American business, although the manufacturing remains carried out in its Laupheim facility.
"The market for antibodies and protein-based drugs has been growing rapidly and so has customer demand," said the spokesperson .
Although, she added, Rentschler has no intention of buying or building new manufacturing facilities in the US.
Indeed, The biopharmaceutical sector is proving lucrative for pharma companies, with approximately one-fourth of new drugs coming on the market being biopharmaceuticals and annual sales projected to surpass $52bn (€41bn) by 2010.