Albumedix more than doubles albumin production with expanded UK plant

Albumedix has completed expansion of its commercial-scale manufacturing facility and established new labs, doubling its albumin production capacity.

After more than three years of design and construction work, Albumedix has completed the expansion of its Nottingham facility and is now able to manufacture out of this site.

The expansion enables the firm to more than double its albumin production, which is used for stabilization and to deliver pharmaceuticals.

Image/iStock: Manakin

“Part of the expansion included the construction of a four-storey building adjacent to the existing manufacturing facility and the installation of new large-capacity utilities including a state-of-the-art purified water system,” a spokeswoman for Albumedix told BioProcess Insider.

Furthermore, its new labs include research facilities that have been designed for upstream and downstream processing, analytics for therapies and future biopharmaceuticals and formulation development.

The firm did not divulge any financials associated with the expansion. However, the expansion of the manufacturing plant and campus is part of its growth strategy to enable stable and scalable therapies for patients around the world.

“Albumedix intends to continue growing in order to keep empowering excellence in advanced therapies, helping these transformative therapies get onto the market and have truly remarkable patient impact,” Albumedix’ spokeswoman told us.

She continued: “Our scientists, together with our partners, continue to expand the boundaries as to where albumin can be applied. With this comes the growing need to address scalability and stability challenges in the advanced therapy and biopharmaceutical field, with a high quality and better performing albumin product such as ours. We are already looking at options to further expand our capabilities and capacity.”

More than doubled

The expansion of the Nottingham site has more than doubled the firms Recombumin production capacity. According to the company, Recombumin is the highest quality animal origin-free recombinant human albumins (rAlb) commercially available product.

“The manufacturing process encompasses large-scale high cell density fed-batch fermentation with downstream processing by continuous disc-stack centrifugation, multi-step large-scale chromatography and ultrafiltration,” said Albumedix’ spokeswoman. “Chromatography column footprints are minimised by the use of pump-packed radial-flow columns.  All products are presented in highly stable liquid formulations either in 50 mL vials or 1 L bioprocess containers.”

The firm believes that with the establishment of its expanded facility and campus, it is able to welcome “the next wave of advanced therapy and complex biopharmaceutical developers to get through the clinic and onto the market,” and ensure “consistent, secure supply to existing and future partners.”