Cambridge, UK 5 January 2018 — Abzena plc (AIM: ABZA, ‘Abzena’ or the ‘Group’), the life sciences group providing services and technologies to enable the development and manufacture of biopharmaceutical products, provides an update on its UK and US facilities.
In Cambridge, UK, the Group’s lease has commenced for 30,000 square feet of space in Building 900 on the Babraham Research Campus, as first announced in February 2015. This building has been developed by Imperial College ThinkSpace (“Imperial”) under a long-lease granted to Imperial for land owned by BBSRC. The building is being managed by Babraham Bioscience Technologies Ltd (“BBT”), the company that develops and manages the Babraham Research Campus. Abzena is consolidating all its UK operations including the head office functions, biology and chemistry research services groups from its two current buildings on the campus into this new facility during January 2018.
The new building has been purpose-built to accommodate Abzena’s needs and enables all the Group’s UK-based science teams to work together in a single, state-of-the-art facility.
The Group has also entered into an agreement with BBT to run and develop the antibody discovery services formerly provided by BBT’s Technology Development Laboratory.
As previously communicated in the interim results announcement of 12 December 2017, Abzena has negotiated and now concluded a lease for a 50,000 square feet facility at Lusk Boulevard, San Diego to consolidate the West Coast biomanufacturing operations into a single state of the art facility. Abzena’s process and analytical development groups will relocate from the existing Torrey Pines laboratories in the second quarter of this year. Following further remodelling of the facility, enabled by substantial landlord-funded tenant improvements to create the biomanufacturing clean rooms to accommodate 500L and 2,000 litre bioreactors, the manufacturing group will relocate to the new facility. The facility is expected to be fully operational from early 2019.
The Group has entered into a preferred biomanufacturing equipment supply and services agreement, as announced by Sartorius Stedim Biotech SA on 4 January 2018, to supply the bioprocess reactor equipment, process analytic software and to provide support for the design of the new biomanufacturing facility in San Diego.
The creation of the GMP conjugation suite at Abzena’s Bristol, PA facility is continuing on track and is expected to be operational around the end of the first quarter of 2018.
John Burt, CEO of Abzena, commented:
“The new facilities in Cambridge and San Diego are an important strategic step in the delivery of our integrated services model and will greatly enhance Abzena’s operations. The combination of state-of-the-art facilities and leading technologies will enable the Group to support its international customers as they progress their drug development programs from research into clinical trials.”
Notes to Editors
About Abzena
Abzena (AIM: ABZA) provides proprietary technologies and complementary services to enable the development and manufacture of biopharmaceutical products.
The term ‘ABZENA Inside’ is used by Abzena to describe products that have been created using its proprietary technologies and are being developed by its partners, and include Composite Human Antibodies™ and ThioBridge™ Antibody Drug Conjugates (ADCs). Abzena has the potential to earn future licence fees, milestone payments and/or royalties on ‘ABZENA Inside’ products.
Abzena offers the following services and technologies across its principal sites in Cambridge (UK), San Diego, California (USA) and Bristol, Pennsylvania (USA):
- Immunology research studies, including immunogenicity assessment of candidate biopharmaceutical products;
- Protein engineering to create humanized antibodies and deimmunised therapeutic proteins;
- Cell line development for the manufacture of recombinant proteins and antibodies;
- Contract process development and GMP manufacture of biopharmaceuticals, including monoclonal antibodies and recombinant proteins for preclinical and clinical studies;
- Contract synthetic chemistry and bioconjugation research services, focused on antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs);
- Proprietary site-specific conjugation technologies and novel payloads for ADC development; and
- GMP manufacturer of ADC linkers, payloads & combined linker-payloads.
For more information, please see www.abzena.com
Contact
Abzena plc
John Burt
Chief Executive Officer
Julian Smith
Chief Financial Officer
Tel: +44 1223 903498
OR
Instinctif Partners
Melanie Toyne Sewell
Alex Shaw
Deborah Bell
Tel: +44 20 7457 2020
Email: abzena@instinctif.com
