Clean Cells bulks up French QC and cell bank production

An investment of €13 million ($15.3 million) will create Europe’s largest site in Europe for biopharmaceuticals quality control services, says Clean Cells.

Clean Biologics group subsidiary Clean Cells has begun constructing a facility set to quadruple its analysis and production capacity for biopharmaceuticals. The project has financial backing from healthcare investment fund ArchiMed, and the facility in Montaigu-Vendée, France is expected to be complete in September 2022, creating 80 new jobs in the region.

“What motivated this expansion is the desire to offer very significant capacities to accelerate the availability of biopharmaceuticals,” Olivier Boisteau, co-founder and strategic adviser at Clean Biologics, told this publication.

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As well as quadrupling biosafety capacity, the investment will increase Clean Cells’ number of production suites from five to nine and with the added cell bank capacity set to support vaccines, therapeutic antibodies and gene therapies.

The expansion comes hand-in-hand with France’s ‘Grand Défi Biomédicaments’, or ‘Great Biopharmaceuticals Challenge’ strategy, launched by the government last year to encourage in-country manufacturing.

“The Great Biopharmaceuticals Challenge is a national (French) initiative to support collaborations between an SME and a national platform -specializing in bioproduction. The Clean cells project is not part of this system, but it benefits from the dynamics that it created.”