Officials at Catalent, a CDMO, recently announced plans for a new gene therapy facility, explaining that the $130 million expansion will add five Phase III through commercial-scale manufacturing suites.
The plant will make extensive use of automation according to Randy Hendrickson, vp, commercial operations, Catalent Cell & Gene Therapy, who tells GEN the approach is key to managing data at the existing plants on the campus.
“Currently, we employ advanced process equipment skids and laboratory instrumentation with standalone automation controls and capabilities for data generation and localized storage,” he explains. “Our goal is to centralize data collection and analysis and have these skids and instruments communicate through the exchange of higher-level data, with a shop floor network (SFN).
