Battelle spinout AmplifyBio LLC is expanding to the San Francisco Bay Area with an asset purchase from a biotech that's recently downsized.
The Central Ohio contract research organization for gene therapy and other regenerative medicine said Monday it has acquired a laboratory and other assets from Pact Pharma Inc. in the city of South San Francisco, and hired 40 of its employees.
Fast-growing AmplifyBio had already grown to 231 employees before the deal, a spokeswoman said via email. Both companies are privately owned and terms were not disclosed.
AmplifyBio had 155 employees at its 30-acre West Jefferson campus as of May, when it announced it was expanding by building a research center in New Albany, and adding more than 260 jobs in the coming years between the two sites and a to-be-determined corporate office.
AmplifyBio launched in May 2021 as a one-stop, end-to-end contract research organization for pharmaceutical makers and other research institutions, able to take a project from early research through commercial development and clinical trials.
Pact, which stands for Personalized Adoptive Cell Therapy, announced in a LinkedIn post on Monday that it will "retain its proprietary research and development capabilities and improve its overall financial position" as a result of the deal. The company co-founded by a Nobel laureate said it aims next year to apply for regulatory approval of its solid-tumor cancer treatment using targeted immune system cells.
The assets that AmplifyBio acquired allow more consistent testing of purity and potency for gene and cell therapies – which is a gap in the industry compared with standard pharmaceuticals that are made with chemical instead of biologic processes, according to a news release. The processes for making a cell or gene therapy can change between the smaller amounts for the earliest phases of testing and large-scale commercial production, the release said, "which can in turn create manufacturing inconsistencies and safety concerns."
"Our acquisition of these assets from Pact Pharma means that cell and gene therapies can now be differentiated based on safety and efficacy profiles and specific product characteristics, not development processes," CEO Kelly Ganjei said in the release.
The 5-year-old Pact has raised a cumulative $266 million in venture capital, but in July announced a restructuring that cut 94 positions including its COO, the San Francisco Business Times reported. It retains its core intellectual property following the deal, according to Monday's release.
"The sale of these select assets to AmplifyBio provides the company with meaningful capital while reducing our operating expenses,” said a statement from Pact CEO Scott Garland in its LinkedIn post. “At the same time, this agreement has the potential to help advance the field of adoptive cell therapies by allowing AmplifyBio to offer the innovative product characterization platforms developed by the Pact team to a broad range of its clients."
AmplifyBio is part of a fast-growing regenerative medicine cluster in Central Ohio, including local startups and offices from out-of-state pharma companies, that are developing proprietary therapies and building biomanufacturing complexes to help solve a critical lack of manufacturing capacity in the industry.
