The Seattle area is home to a new nimble drug manufacturing facility built by Just – Evotec Biologics that was unveiled Wednesday in an opening ceremony at the 130,000 square-foot facility in Redmond, Wash.
The plant is slated to manufacture antibodies for the U.S. Department of Defense to potentially treat COVID-19 and can pump out such protein-based agents more efficiently and at lower cost than conventional plants, according to the company.
The facility “brings new, highly innovative, commercial scale manufacturing capabilities to our industry, with the flexibility to produce small and large quantities of drug substance for biotech companies locally and around the globe,” said Leslie Alexandre, CEO of industry trade group Life Science Washington, in a press release.
Just – Evotec Biologics has its origins in Just Biotherapeutics, a Seattle startup founded in 2014 with the aim of reducing the cost of producing protein therapeutics and making them more accessible worldwide. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed company was acquired in 2019 by Hamburg, Germany-based Evotec SE, and is now an Evotec subsidiary. The new plant is the capstone of an end-to-end drug development and manufacturing platform developed at the company.
Just – Evotec can design, develop and manufacture antibodies by starting with a drug target, a molecule identified as key to a disease. Machine learning helps identify potential therapeutic antibodies and proprietary software hones the antibody design to yield high volumes of stable product.
The new plant uses a process called continuous manufacturing, an emerging technology that is more efficient than the conventional large-scale batch processing commonly used to make such biologics.
“We’ve shrunk the size of the operation to maybe a tenth of the scale of these larger scale facilities,” said James Thomas, executive vice president and global head of biotherapeutics for Just – Evotec, in an interview with GeekWire.
He added: “We can make the same amount of product that they can make, but we can do it in a much smaller, much more flexible facility.”
The facility, called J.POD 1, can make material by the kilogram or the ton using modular clean rooms called pods that contain bioreactors and other equipment for continuous production.
The company has its own drug development pipeline and also has multiple partnerships, including with Seattle-based OncoResponse to help develop and manufacture a therapeutic anti-cancer antibody for clinical trials. Just-Evotec also recently announced a $15 million multi-year extension of its collaboration with drug giant Merck.
The company sealed its $28.6 million agreement to manufacture antibodies against the virus that causes COVID-19 with the Department of Defense in January. The antibodies will be used to develop a treatment or prophylaxis for COVD-19. The company is also developing similar antibodies with other partners, including the Gates Foundation, and has the capability of manufacturing vaccines as well, said Thomas, the former CEO and founding partner of Just.
The facility was built in just 19 months — much of that during the pandemic — compared to the four or more years required for a conventional plant.
The actual manufacturing space in the new plant currently takes up only about 10% of the facility and is expandable, said Thomas. The rest of the space is devoted to office and meeting rooms; a lab for testing and developing manufacturing processes; and a warehouse.
The new J.POD facility adds to a growing drug and vaccine manufacturing base in Washington state. Bothell, Wash.-based AGC Biologics and Spokane-based Jubilant HollisterStier, for instance, are both making products for Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Just – Evotec currently employs more than 250 people and is expected to grow to about 300 by the end of the year. The company will retain its current clinical manufacturing facility in Seattle. It is also planning to build a similar facility in France, J.POD 2. “It’s a deployable technology so we can build these facilities relatively rapidly,” said Thomas.
J.POD 1 is the realization of a long-standing vision to improve manufacturing of protein therapeutics, said Thomas, whose previous experience includes leading manufacturing process development for Seattle biotech flagship Immunex, which was acquired by Amgen. “We are about technology first and foremost,” said Thomas. “We’re trying to lead the industry.”
