Kite Pharma, Gilead Sciences’ cell-therapy subsidiary, has leased and purchased new facilities in the US and Europe to expand its cell-therapy manufacturing capabilities.

Kite has leased a new facility in Hoofddorp, the Netherlands to engineer cell therapies. The 117,000-square-foot site will be used to manufacture and deliver cell therapies to people living with cancer in Europe. The facility will engineer and produce cell therapies, including axicabtagene ciloleucel, a chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy that is currently under review by the European Medicines Agency and which was approved in October 2017 in the US as Yescarta for treating adult patients with relapsed or refractory large B-cell lymphoma. The new facility is scheduled to be fully operational in 2020.

In addition to the Netherlands facility, Kite has recently purchased a new building in Santa Monica from Astellas Pharma that will be used for cell-therapy research, development, and the expansion of clinical manufacturing capabilities. Kite has also leased a 26,000-square-foot facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The Maryland site will support the work of a new Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with the National Cancer Institute to develop adoptive cell therapies targeting patient-specific tumor neoantigens. Neoantigens are mutations found on the surface of cancer cells that are unique to each person and tumor.

Gilead acquired Kite Pharma in October 2017 for $11.9 billion. 

Source: Gilead Sciences