Univercells Technologies has completed a €2 million ($1.9 million) expansion of its Nivelles, Belgium site.

Work began at the site in December 2020 and Univercells claims the expansion has doubled its overall footprint while tripling its manufacturing capacity at the plant. Furthermore, the firm says that the expansion has enabled it to provide customers with supply chain security

“The first phase has provided a larger warehouse storage as well as the ISO 8 clean room space, greatly increasing capacity for bioreactors and related single use assemblies. With the completion of the expansion, customers are now invited to come on site to work in one of the new ‘hands-on’ bioprocess training suites for guidance and support,” Mathias Garny, CEO of Univercells told BioProcess Insider.

DepositPhotos/SergeyNivens

“The facility expansion also allows the company to maintain its highly competitive bioreactor and manifold lead-times of under a month for standard items and maintaining high on time shipment while demand grows. From an employee point of view, remodeling the office and workshop spaces provides a flexible and modern workplace.”

Meanwhile…

In other news, the firm has launched its scale-X cell collect module, which it says has been designed to overcome the bottlenecks of advanced therapy large-scale manufacturing.

“Scale-X cell collect is an add-on cell harvest module for the scale-X carbo bioreactor, which efficiently retrieves cells through a combination of enzymatic and mechanical action, for the inoculation of larger bioreactors with high numbers of cells,” said Garny.

The technology is said to be able to produce large volumes of cells in order to “inoculate large-scale bioreactors in a high-quality, low-risk-of-failure, and low-cost manner.” In turn, the firm claims that this tackles issues often caused by the traditional cell expansion technologies such as flatware, which Garny says constrains “the user to scale out, with its associated challenges (high aseptic risk; large footprint, CAPEX, OPEX, and operation time; low reproducibility).”