A month after unveiling plans for a new manufacturing facility in Geneva, KBI Biopharma has already pegged the location for its next site: a $150 million facility in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
The 140,000-square-foot facility will be fully operational by Q1 2022, and the contract services company says it will be home to more than 200 operations and quality assurance staffers. A mystery partner is chipping in on the facility to manufacture its protein therapies, though KBI is keeping mum about who.
“Expansion of our US-based cell culture operations is a key investment to support our client’s commercialization strategies,” KBI president and CEO Dirk Lange said in a statement.
The new site is about a five-minute drive from Patriot Park, where KBI’s mammalian drug development labs are already located. The company says its new facility will house up to six 2,000-liter, single-use bioreactor systems and associated harvest and purification equipment, which could pump out more than 100 commercial batches a year. KBI touted that the facility will also include electronic batch records, electronic logbooks, paperless materials management and Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) for quality control data management.
“By expanding our commercial manufacturing footprint with this facility, we are able to provide our partners with launch material and market supply,” Lange said. “We chose to build this new facility in the Research Triangle Park because it gives us access to highly-specialized resources. The combination of talent, technical and academic training in this region is outstanding, which is critical as we are expanding our impact by serving more clients and patients from this new facility.”
RTP, close to three of the state’s top research universities, is home to a growing number of CDMOs and biopharma companies. Back in January, Eli Lilly reserved $470 million for a new manufacturing site in the area to begin production of injectable products and delivery devices.
