US facility · Pharma
Astellas's Audentes to build $109 million gene therapy plant in North Carolina
- Company
- Astellas Pharma (via Audentes Therapeutics) (Tokyo)
- Project
- Gene therapy manufacturing plant, Sanford, North Carolina
- Value
- $109M
- Status
- Opened June 8, 2022, about a year later than first planned. It makes gene therapy vectors for Astellas at clinical and commercial scale.
- Date
- 2020-02-18
Audentes Therapeutics, which Astellas bought for about $3 billion in a deal that closed in January 2020, said it would invest $109 million in a 135,000-square-foot gene therapy plant in Sanford and create more than 200 jobs. The company was outgrowing its plant in South San Francisco. North Carolina's commerce department supported the project.
Why it matters
It was Astellas's first big manufacturing step after the Audentes deal and added to North Carolina's growing gene therapy cluster.
Why North Carolina
Audentes looked at California, Massachusetts and Colorado before picking a shell building in the Central Carolina Enterprise Park, about 45 miles southwest of Raleigh. Pfizer, Bluebird bio and Novartis's AveXis already had or were building gene therapy sites in the state. The jobs were to pay an average of $83,900, about twice the Lee County average, and the state offered a grant of up to $3.7 million tied to hiring, with $5.7 million more from the county and city.
Making gene therapies
A gene therapy needs both the new DNA and the virus shell that carries it, and one dose for a muscle disease can hold billions of virus particles, so supply can become a bottleneck. Audentes weighed using contract makers such as Lonza and Catalent but chose to build its own plant. Its lead therapy at the time was AT132, for the rare muscle disease X-linked myotubular myopathy.
Sources
Kakehashi M&A News home
