Celebrating one year of operation at the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult manufacturing centre

It is one year since Business Secretary Greg Clark and Science Minister Sam Gyimah officially opened the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult manufacturing centre. One year on, the Stevenage based centre is now supporting the rapidly growing global cell and gene therapy industry in the UK and five companies are developing GMP manufacturing processes at the centre.

The CGT Catapult manufacturing centre is now home to five innovative UK and US cell and gene therapy companies, Adaptimmune, Autolus, Cell Medica, Freeline Therapeutics and TCR2 Therapeutics, who are developing their GMP manufacturing processes, preparing for large scale and commercial supply.

This year has seen the centre granted two licences from the MHRA, allowing for the production of commercial medicines for patient use or to support clinical trials. Autolus have become the first collaborating company to be granted a manufacturing licence variation, allowing the company to begin manufacturing materials for clinical trial supply from the centre.

The journey over the past year has resulted in some important learnings for the centre and the wider industry. Collaborators in the facility have gone through a comprehensive selection and on-boarding procedure to ensure that the centre is suitable for their development needs. The GMP warehouse is evolving to meet increasing demand. Flexible quality control capabilities are being built and we are working with current collaborators to maximise material throughput in their clean rooms.

The cell and gene therapy cluster in Stevenage is seeing extraordinary growth, with companies receiving significant investment. The ThermoFisher CryoHub will provide cryostorage logistics services to collaborating companies and other companies based at the cluster.

Companies at cluster receive significant investment

To find out more take a look at this update.

Looking forward:

The centre capacity is increasing through the construction of six additional modules in the already constructed space on the second floor. The six additional modules will contain grade C clean rooms and each will have a production footprint of 130m2. Collaborators are expected to start on-boarding into these new modules at the end of this year.