GenScript rolled out its first cell and gene therapy manufacturing facility in the U.S. As the Chinese CDMO and CRO sets its sights on speeding up production in developing new vaccines, the 50,000-square-foot facility marks GenScript’s first automated plant in the country.
The $13 million facility will provide a tenfold increase in capacity. To be located near the company’s U.S. headquarters in Piscataway, New Jersey, the plant will create between 100 and 200 new jobs over the next two years, the company said.
Cell and gene therapy production is typically a labor-intensive operation. Spurred on by the demand for vaccines to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, however, manufacturers have begun adopting more fully automated technologies.
Robots can now do more manual operations in areas of cell therapy production and software systems. Additionally, the use of artificial intelligence reduces time on record-keeping for regulatory agencies and overall operations. Many automated lines can now run in parallel versus consecutively, allowing for high production rates.
“This specialized laboratory and manufacturing facility allows us to deliver reliable products to (customers) faster than ever before,” Ray Chen, president of GenScript’s USA Life Science Group, said in a statement. “This site also gives our U.S. customers additional production resilience in case of unexpected events such a pandemics and changes in customers and trade regulations.”
GenScript focuses on DNA synthesis and globally has completed more than 600,000 gene synthesis projects. It manufactures DNA fragments of up to 200kb for new applications in the area of synthetic biology.
