Medical biotech company Orca Bio plans to complete a new 100,000-square-foot facility at Metro Air Park by the end of the year.
The new center will support the commercialization of the Menlo Park-based company’s precision cell therapies for blood cancer patients with quick and easy access to airports around the country.
Orca Bio is now in clinical trials for its cell therapies that “replace a patient’s malignant immune system with a new immune system from a donor,” co-founder Jeroen Bekaert told the Business Journal.
Orca chose Sacramento for its cell-sorting processing because of access to the airport coupled with access to talent from the University of California Davis and UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, Bekaert said.
For several years, the company has had a team working on early-stage clinical studies in a 10,000-square-foot office near the Tahoe Park neighborhood in Sacramento. About half of Orca Bio's 100 employees work in Sacramento in that location now.
The existing Sacramento team will continue to work on the company’s early-stage clinical pipeline. Orca plans to hire more employees at the Metro Air Park facility to support its late-stage clinical pipeline and manufacturing of potential commercial products. While the building is expected to be completed by the end of the year, it's expected to take several more months to get processing operations running.
In August, Orca began enrolling 174 patients in about 20 clinical sites for randomized studies.
In that third-stage medical study, the company is preparing to test its Precision-T process, where its technology selects and purifies beneficial cells from a matched donor and eliminates and de-selects harmful cells. The aim of the process is to support blood cancer patients’ immune systems without triggering harmful side effects from the therapy that can occur when the body rejects donor cells.
Orca Bio was interested in the airport-adjacent location because it seeks to take donor cells, process them, and ship them to a patient in about 60 hours. It has a window of about 72 hours where the therapy is viable. Metro Air Park is just east of Sacramento International Airport.
In addition to cancer, Orca Bio’s technology has potential to treat genetic blood disorders and autoimmune diseases.
Founded in 2016, the company came out of stealth mode in 2020 when it raised $192 million in a funding round led by Menlo Park-based private equity firm Lightspeed Venture Partners and with participation by 8VC, DCVC Bio, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and Kaiser Permanente Group Trust, among others. At that time, the investment brought Orca to $300 million raised.
