Lonza to Expand Viral Production Capacity

The expansion will also notably reduce Lonza’s clients’ wait times for clean room capacity due to the ability to run multiple cGMP operations simultaneously.

5/19/2011 --- Lonza announced it will expand its viral-based therapeutics business with the construction of a new, state-of-the-art cGMP clean room located adjacent to its existing Houston, Texas operations.

The clean room will benefit customers by offering large-scale capacity to support late- stage viral vaccine and gene therapy projects. It will utilize disposable process systems and be able to support production and fill/finish operations of up to 2,000 liters. Enhanced, EU compliant fill and finish capabilities are in high demand from Lonza’s pharma and biotech customers. The expansion will also notably reduce Lonza’s clients’ wait times for clean room capacity due to the ability to run multiple cGMP operations simultaneously.

“We are very pleased with the growing number of opportunities we are seeing in the viral vaccine and viral vector sector,” said David Enloe, Head of Lonza’s viral-based therapeutics unit. “This investment only furthers our commitment to a leadership position in this exciting space of new therapeutics and vaccines.” Construction and validation of Lonza’s viral expansion is expected to be complete early 2012.

Today, viral vaccines are being studied closely for infectious diseases such as AIDS, influenza and malaria. The achievable volumes and relative costs to manufacture virally-delivered vaccines versus traditional egg-based vaccines makes this field a compelling alternative production approach. Viral-delivered gene therapy is also a growing market, with many programs in development for cancer, central nervous system diseases (e.g. Parkinson’s and Huntington’s) and eye-related diseases such as advanced macular degeneration.

Lonza has broad experience in pre-clinical through commercial scale cGMP production of multiple viral products and Lonza’s viral-based therapeutics team has over 15 years of experience in process and analytical assay development and validation, scale-up, cGMP production, product storage and distribution. Lonza also helps clients advance their viral vector and vaccine programs with its significant regulatory experience in the viral field.