Center for Breakthrough Medicines Proposes 1M square feet of New Life Sciences Space
Center for Breakthrough Medicines, which is housed within the 3-million-square-foot Discovery Labs bio-innovation hub, said this week it plans to accelerate its plans to build capacity to manufacture more than 10,000 patient cell therapies.
The King of Prussia contract development and manufacturing organization said the move is in direct response to the critical supply shortage of cell therapies for patients battling cancer.
Joerg Ahlgrimm, CEO of the Center for Breakthrough Medicines, said the organization originally expected to begin the planning process for building its manufacturing capacity in 2024 or 2025. Now, he said, the process will begin right away.
“Everything we see tells us once these therapies hit the commercial market, the demand is very, very high,” Ahlgrimm told the Business Journal.
Ahlgrimm said as more experimental cell therapies enter the human-testing stage, the demand for samples to be used in clinical trials is also growing.
“We are acutely aware of the importance of getting these life-saving therapies to patients immediately,” he said.
The exact cost of the manufacturing expansion will be determined during the planning process, but it is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars over the coming years. When completed, the center’s cell therapy manufacturing suites and supporting infrastructure will have the ability to produce treatments for more than 10,000 patients per year.