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Avecia Biologics marks 10 years of Biopharmaceutical manufacture

Date: 16/12/2008

Avecia Biologics is celebrating 10 years of manufacturing innovative microbial-based biopharmaceuticals to current Good Manufacturing Practice (cGMP) standards.

The company’s 100L and 1000L scale Advanced Biologics Centre, known as ABC1000, opened in December 1998 at the company’s Tees Valley, UK site. Since that time, more than 50 different customer products for early clinical phase have been successfully manufactured in the facility. Large scale manufacturing for late phase and marketed biopharmaceuticals is carried out in the company’s ABC5000 facility, which opened in Q4 2003.

Among the many types of customer projects to have been manufactured in ABC1000 have been antibody fragments, antibody mimetics, recombinant vaccine proteins and fusion proteins, to name but a few, treating a range of diseases from stroke and cancer to blood disorders and infections.

Designed as a highly flexible facility and operating model, ABC1000 has also helped Avecia to stay at the forefront of technological developments in the industry in a period which has seen many advances. The global biologics market has grown from US$15bn in 1998 to US$65bn in 2008, and seen a rise from around 50 recombinant drugs being approved ten years ago to more than 120 today.


Dr Stephen Taylor, commercial director, Avecia Biologics, said: “The work we have been able to do, thanks to ABC1000 and our process development teams, has given Avecia an enviable track record and position in the market from which we can begin our second decade of cGMP microbial-based biopharmaceutical manufacture. The tenth anniversary of ABC1000 is a real opportunity to look back upon the last decade, in terms of how both Avecia, and the industry as a whole, has developed. Ten years ago contract manufacture of biologics was in its infancy – now we have CMOs involved in over 60% of new products, a remarkable testament to the value our business model can bring.”


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