BioNTech Buying Cell Therapy Plant from Kite
Germany’s BioNTech, best known publicly for the Covid-19 vaccine Comirnaty it developed in partnership with US drugs giant Pfizer, has announced plans to buy a cell therapy R&D platform and clinical manufacturing plant from Gilead Sciences’ Kite Pharma subsidiary.
The plant at Gaithersburg, Maryland, which will be used to boost supply for clinical trials, will be the biotech’s first US cell therapy facility, complementing an existing plant at Idar-Oberstein Germany, not far from its Mainz headquarters.
Terms of the deal, expected to close by the end of July, were not disclosed, but BioNTech said it will be a one-off payment. The company plans to offer jobs to all of the plant’s employees and, without providing details, said it will make additional investments and increase the workforce at the Maryland facility.
Vaccines apart,”the development of individualized cancer therapies is at the core of our work at BioNTech,” Ugur Sahin, the company’s CEO and co-founder (with his wife, Özlem Türeci), said. The most recent buy, he added, builds on the successful integration of adoptive T-cell and neoantigen TCR therapies it gained in the $67 million of acquisition of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based US biotech Neon Therapeutics in May 2020.
The new US capability will support the development of BioNTech’s expanding pipeline of novel cell therapies, including cancer product candidates based on its CAR T-cell amplifying mRNA vaccine (CARVac) and NEOSTIM platform, as well as the newly added individualized neoantigen TCR program that redirects a patient’s immune system to recognize and target tumors.
Kite’s new plant for commercial production of CAR-T cell therapy is not part of the purchase agreement. With the divestment of the businesses transferred to BioNTech, Christi Shaw, CEO of the Santa Monica, California-based company, said Kite will be able to focus its energy and investment on accelerating the reach of its current CAR T-cell therapies and mid-term pipeline.
Author: Dede Williams, Freelance Journalist
