Intellia Therapeutics, the first-in-human gene-editing biotech, inked a deal to lease a manufacturing facility designed to produce key elements of its CRISPR-based investigational therapies.
The 140,000-square-foot facility will be constructed in Waltham, Massachusetts, by Alexandria Real Estate Equities and is expected to be operational by 2024, the company said.
Financial details of the lease/construction pact weren’t disclosed.
The new facility will support Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Intellia’s preclinical through commercial supply operations.
“This new facility is a strategic investment, which in combination with existing capabilities and partnerships, will provide us with significant manufacturing capacity and accelerate the clinical development and future commercial production for our therapeutic candidates,” Eliana Clark, Intellia’s chief technical officer, said in a statement.
RELATED: Intellia-ONK ink up to $920M pact for 5 CRISPR-edited cancer cell therapies
Intellia, which was founded in 2014, has been busy of late making deals on a number of fronts. Last week, the company unveiled a collaboration with Ireland’s ONK Therapeutics worth up to $920 million to Intellia in exchange for nonexclusive rights to its ex vivo gene editing and delivery tech as well as exclusive rights to specific guide RNAs for up to five NK cell therapies for various cancers.
The collaboration came quick on the heels of Intellia shelling out up to $200 million to acquire Rewrite Therapeutics, a gene-editing spinoff from the University of California, Berkeley.
Intellia has a number of therapies in its development pipeline. Currently, two in vivo therapies are in the early-stage clinical arena for transthyretin amyloidosis, which affects the nerves, heart, kidneys and eyes; and hereditary angioedema, a genetic disease that can result in recurring, severe and unpredictable swelling in various areas of the body.
Its ex vivo candidates to treat sickle cell and acute myeloid leukemia are also in early-stage clinical development.