Northway Biotech has opened a $72 million cell-therapy and personalized-medicine contract development and manufacturing facility in Vilnius, Lithuania, expanding its capacity to develop and produce advanced therapies.
The 3,500-square-meter facility, part of the company’s BIO CITY III development, is the first dedicated center of its kind in the Baltic States, according to Northway. It will support biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, university hospitals and research institutions, with initial customers and contracts already in place.
The center will operate up to 20 independent current good manufacturing practice, or cGMP, production lines. It is designed to manufacture autologous and allogeneic cell therapies, personalized therapeutic vaccines, regenerative-medicine products and three-dimensional human tissue technologies.
Autologous therapies use cells from the patient receiving treatment, while allogeneic products are developed from donor cells. The facility’s segregated manufacturing design is intended to allow multiple cell-based products and processes to run in parallel while maintaining product identity, quality, traceability and contamination controls.
The project is operated by the Stem Cell Research Center under the Northway Biotech brand. The company, founded in 2011 by Northway Group founder Vladas Algirdas Bumelis, marks its 15th anniversary this year.
The new center includes quality-control laboratories, cleanroom systems and infrastructure for handling sensitive cell-based products. In some personalized-therapy applications, an individual manufacturing process may be dedicated to a single patient, Northway said.
Northway expects the facility to bring together about 100 life-sciences professionals. The $72 million project is funded through private capital and a loan from Lithuania’s national development bank, ILTE, under its Billion for Business initiative.
Northway said the facility will expand its work in cancer-directed immune-cell technologies, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and personalized vaccine development. It will also support development of 3D human tissue models for studying drug effects and advancing regenerative-medicine research.
The opening expands Northway’s wider BIO CITY network. BIO CITY I houses mammalian and microbial biologics development and manufacturing capabilities in Vilnius and Boston, while BIO CITY II is dedicated to gene therapy. BIO CITY III adds cell therapy and personalized medicine to the company’s integrated CDMO operations.