Takeda has opened a new 24,000-square-foot R&D and clinical cell-therapy manufacturing facility at its R&D headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts.

The facility will produce cell therapies for clinical evaluation from discovery through Phase IIb trials. The facility is designed to meet all US, European Union, and Japanese regulatory requirements for cell-therapy manufacturing to support Takeda’s clinical trials globally.

Takeda and the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas are developing a potential allogeneic cell therapy product (TAK-007), a Phase I/II CD19-targeted chimeric antigen receptor-directed natural killer (CAR-NK) cell therapy with the potential for off-the-shelf use that is being studied in patients with relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

Two additional Phase I studies of Takeda cell-therapy programs were recently initiated for the following: (1) TAK-940, a CAR-T cell therapy developed in partnership with the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to treat relapsed/refractory B-cell cancers; and (2) TAK-102, a CAR-T therapy developed in partnership with Noile-Immune Biotech, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, to treat GPC3-expressing previously treated solid tumors.

Source: Takeda