Orchard Therapeutics, a commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on serious and life-threatening rare diseases through gene therapies, has signed a long-term lease agreement to build-out a gene therapy manufacturing facility in Fremont, California.
The new 150,000-square-foot facility significantly increases Orchard’s California footprint and adds to the Foster City and Menlo Park, California sites, which oversee the ongoing development and validation of the manufacture of Orchard’s ex vivo gene therapy product candidates.
Once operational, the new site will provide significant additional cGMP manufacturing capacity for both lentiviral vector and cryopreserved cell therapy products, enhancing Orchard’s ability to manufacture and deliver gene-corrected hematopoetic stem cells for a wide range of diseases on a global basis.
In addition to this expanded capacity, Orchard also plans to continue its close collaborations with the company’s contract manufacturing partners.
The build-out of Orchard’s new manufacturing facility is expected to begin in 2019, and the company expects to hire more than 100 full-time employees over the next few years to support in-house manufacturing efforts.
(Source: Orchard Therapeutics)
