AmplifyBio LLC, a contract research organization for regenerative medicine, will expand into manufacturing materials like cell and gene therapies or mRNA vaccines at its soon-to-open New Albany lab.
The massive 350,000-square-foot facility also could ease Central Ohio's space crunch for biotech startups such as gene therapy spinouts from Nationwide Children's Hospital and Ohio State University. The Amplify Manufacturing Enablement Center includes rentable cleanroom manufacturing suites.
"These innovative hybrid outsourcing options come at a time when the drug development industry is facing capital constraints and is eager for alternatives to challenging buy vs. build options," the Battelle spinout said in a news release Tuesday.
The biotech manufacturing facility's first phase is set to open by the end of March, the release said. Besides the manufacturing suites, it has laboratories for process development, analytics and quality testing.
Clients trying to develop treatments until ready for clinical testing can rent manufacturing space that they staff or fully outsource the work to AmplifyBio, according to the website – or deploy a hybrid of client researchers augmented by AmplifyBio's capabilities.
The New Albany facility is almost equal to the combined size of Central Ohio's two startup biotech manufacturers for cell and gene therapies: Columbus-based Andelyn Biosciences Inc., 180,000 square feet, and Grove City-based Forge Biologics Inc., 200,000 square feet. Those companies work with clients from research phases through the larger capacity for commercial production.
Announced a year and a half ago, the Licking County facility at 9885 Innovation Campus Way is about a 35-minute drive from AmplifyBio's West Jefferson headquarters at 1425 Plain-City Georgesville Road in Madison County. The city of New Albany had projected the investment at $150 million.
AmplifyBio has 311 employees, including 70 in its San Francisco-area lab, a spokeswoman said via email. The company spun out of Columbus research giant Battelle with 125 scientists and technicians in May 2021. One year later it was awarded a performance-based state tax credit to grow to a combined 418 jobs within Ohio by 2026, including West Jefferson, New Albany and a to-be-named HQ site.
So far it's added 85 of the pledged new jobs and is recruiting for 30 open positions, with growth to come as the facility opens in phases, the spokeswoman said.
Separately, AmplifyBio indicated in a recent regulatory filing that it had raised nearly $50 million toward a $100 million goal, but the company cannot comment yet on the round. In 2021 it launched with $100 million worth of in-kind property and equipment from Battelle and $100 million in venture capital, then landed a $50 million credit facility.
AmplifyBio takes a project from early research through commercial development and clinical trials – such as testing toxicity and safety, testing whether the therapy is effective in a lab dish or in animals, and designing systems to determine how different parts of a genetic sequence function in the proposed therapy.
Manufacturing is the next logical step in the startup's mission to close the gap between the earliest research into a therapy and full commercialization, while maintaining consistency and safety of the biomaterials when made in larger batches, CEO J. Kelly Ganjei said in the release.
"We can now truly offer an end-to-end technology-empowered journey to commercialization for a wide variety of advanced therapies that will continue to change more and more lives," he said.
