Aragen Life Sciences is earmarking $30 million for a factory in Bangalore to serve its “rapidly expanding” U.S.-based biologics business, the company said Monday.
It will be the third manufacturing facility in India for Aragen, a contract research development and manufacturing organization based in Hyderabad. The company also has plants in Visakhapatnam and at its headquarters.
The new facility is expected to occupy 160,000 square feet and share a campus with an Aragen R&D site. It will feature process development labs, manufacturing suites and quality control labs. The site will employ single-use bioreactors, the company said.
Plans call for the site to develop and produce monoclonal antibodies and therapeutic and fusion proteins to augment the company’s early-stage efforts at its R&D site in Morgan Hill, California, south of San Francisco, Aragen said.
“As the molecule advances, Aragen can tech-transfer the program to our world-class manufacturing facility in Bangalore, offering better COGS (cost of goods sold) to our customers,” Manni Kantipudi, Aragen's CEO, said in a statement.
The process development lab is scheduled for completion in the third quarter of 2024, with the first manufacturing suite set to kick off production in the third quarter of 2025, the company said.
The facility is expected to speed development timelines and to make Aragen a “one-stop solution provider for large molecules,” Aragen Bioscience CEO Subodh Deshmukh said.