Allogene building Cali allogeneic CAR-T facility

Allogene has confirmed it is building a 118,000 square foot cell therapy manufacturing facility in Newark, California to support its AlloCAR T candidates.

Last month, Allogene Therapeutics revealed to BioProcess Insider its intentions to establish a manufacturing facility in the San Francisco Bay area.

The firm did not provide projections at the time, but has now said it has entered a lease agreement at a site in Newark, California to build a 118,000 square foot cell therapy manufacturing facility.

Image: iStock/the_guitar_mann

“This manufacturing facility and continued build out of our in-house process development and characterization capability will allow us to advance manufacturing and secure the supply of our AlloCAR T therapies,” Alison Moore, CTO of Allogene said in a statement.

Allogene, founded last year by former Kite Pharma executives, aims to bring allogeneic chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies to the market.

According to the firm, its AlloCAR T therapies are made using T cells harvested from healthy donors that are then engineered to express CARs designed to recognize certain cell surface proteins expressed on hematologic or solid tumors. Genes within T cells are then edited to reduce the risk of graft versus host disease and allogeneic rejection.

Lead candidate UCART19 is being co-sponsored by Servier and is one of a number of partnered CAR-T programs Allogene taken over from Pfizer in April 2018. Pfizer traded its rights to UCART19 and 16 preclinical CAR-T candidates for a 25 percent stake in Allogene.