Regenxbio has opened the doors at its new $65 million gene therapy manufacturing facility in Rockville, Maryland.
The completed project, which is located in the company’s 132,000-square-foot headquarters, will allow Regenxbio to boost manufacturing of its adeno-associated virus vectors at scales of up to 2,000 liters. The facility is designed to support Regenxbio’s Navxpress platform suspension cell culture process that can increase product purity and yield, the company said.
The company has shelled out more than $100 million and hired 200 people in recent years as it has been building up its Rockville operations in preparation to offer end-to-end capabilities, from R&D to commercial manufacturing, in the gene therapy field.
Last October, the company signed on to a new U.S. initiative to go after gene therapies for rare diseases. The initiative is dubbed the Bespoke Gene Therapy Consortium, or BGTC, and is headed up by the FDA and the National Institutes of Health.
Other signatories include Biogen, Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen pharmaceutical unit, Pfizer, the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, Spark Therapeutics, Takeda, Taysha Gene Therapies, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Ultragenyx.
Joining the consortium came close on the heels of AbbVie doling out $370 million in September to Regenxbio for its eye disease gene therapy RGX-314. The therapy encodes for an antibody fragment designed to inhibit the vascular endothelial growth factor that is implicated in eyes diseases like wet age-related macular degeneration.