“ This is our new 2,000 liter bioreactor that just recently arrived. It will be followed next year by another bioreactor of identical capacity. » In the clean room of the factory located in Alès (Gard), where the brand new equipment intended for the manufacture of biomedicines sits, the general director of LFB Biomanufacturing, Herbert Guedegbe, does not hide his enthusiasm. “ Until now, we only had 1,000 liter bioreactors. Thanks to these new tanks, we will change dimension by doubling our production capacities »he says.
The capricious weather and the absence, due to the electoral reserve period, of the Minister of Labor, Health and Solidarity, Catherine Vautrin, will not have prevented the company (80 employees), a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical group public LFB, to celebrate, this Friday, June 14, the laying of the first stone of its extension project, which is scheduled for completion in 2026.
The investment of 20 million euros, supported to the tune of 6.7 million euros by the France 2030 plan, and which will be accompanied by around fifty recruitments, is strategic. Because biological drugs, these treatments derived from living organisms, unlike drugs obtained by chemical synthesis, have been booming in recent years, particularly in the field of anticancer drugs where they represent a large part of the new treatments placed on the market. “ Today, 59% of drugs in development worldwide are biotherapies »observes Jacques Brom, general director of LFB.
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A windfall including LFB Biomanufacturing, which achieves 75% of its turnover thanks to its subcontracting activity for third parties in the pharmaceutical industry (the rest of the activity is devoted to the manufacture of a drug against hemophilia for its parent company), intends to take advantage. “ Today we have six to seven main clients. With this expansion, we aim to double this number by 2026 », specifies Herbert Guedegbe. Established for more than two decades in the former mining town of Gard, at the gateway to the Cévennes, the manufacturer specializes in the manufacture of therapeutic proteins, in particular monoclonal antibodies.
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Using the gene targeting the disease, the site’s teams are developing a manufacturing process for the client in the laboratory which will then allow it to be cultivated on a large scale in bioreactors at a controlled temperature. Concretely, the gene is inserted into a mammalian cell, to which a solution is added which will nourish the whole to promote multiplication. The protein of interest, that is to say the active ingredient of the future drug, is then extracted from the mixture by different purification and filtration methods.
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