Maria Fardis, PhD, MBA, Lion Biotechnologies President and CEO, told us the company is expanding on its existing relationship with WuXi, which Fardis said is “favorable.”
“They have the capacity we were looking for,” she said, adding that this includes both clinical and potentially commercial ready sites.
“We have two different types of suites,” Fardis explained further, one of which the company has already been doing tech transfer into.
“Starting tech transfer into [the second] suite will be coming later into the second part of 2017,” added Fardis. “We’re starting with the smaller and moving into the larger, higher capacity suite.”
Alan Moore, Vice President and Commercial Chief, Biologics and Advanced Therapies, at WuXi AppTec told us that supporting the Lion program takes advantage of previous investments in facility expansion from 2013 and 2014.
"The facilities were designed to offer the flexibility of supporting a range of manufacturing processes, and the facility will accommodate the specific requirements for the Lion process," added Moore.
"Work has been underway and the manufacturing effort will mirror the clinical trial capacity requirements as these evolve."
Prima Biomed contract
Last week the biomanufacturing division of WuXi PharmaTech, WuXi Biolgoics, announced that it won a contract to provide clinical batches of Prima Biomed’s lead product IMP321 – a soluble LAG-31g fusion protein in Phase II trials intended to boost T cell responses in patients with metastatic breast cancer.