Seattle, Washington-headquartered AGC Biologics has increased the manufacturing capabilities of its production facility in Milan, Italy, citing increased demand.

Earlier this year, the company signed an additional agreement with Genenta Science to produce lentivirus-based products for Genenta’s clinical programmes. The agreement expands upon the previous collaboration deal with Genenta to scale manufacturing for the Phase II trial.

Furthermore, the Danish company is currently conducting research, with plans for preclinical trials by the end of this year, on the feasibility of using exosome-based therapy for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The project is part of a service agreement with Jikei University, Japan.

AGC also has manufacturing agreements with RoosterBio and Novavax for the production of cell therapies and the Covid-19 vaccine adjuvant, respectively.

As part of this scale-up, the company added five additional suspension single-use bioreactors, one with 50L and two each of 200L and 1000L. In addition, the expansion made space for four iCellis500 adherent single-use bioreactors and a 1,000m² warehouse, as per AGC’s press release. The latest news comes three years after AGC acquired the Milan production site in July 2020.

AGC’s general manager Luca Alberici described the expansion as an important AGC milestone to increase production, saying: “When you combine [Milan expansion] with our development, analytical and fill/finish services, this site can offer cell and gene developers any type of support they need throughout their product’s lifecycle.”   

In addition to the Milan manufacturing site, AGC has other cell and gene facilities in the US, Denmark, Italy, Japan and Germany. The German facility was responsible for manufacturing plasmid DNA and starting materials used in Comirnaty, Pfizer and BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine.

Note: This article has been updated to correctly reflect the headquarters of AGC Biologics.