Automated cell processing and gene therapy services company ThermoGenesis Holdings Inc. opened new shared clean-room and wet-lab spaces for lease to other medical science companies.
The entire facility is 35,500 square feet, which includes access to medical-grade clean rooms, coworking space and private offices.
“Early-stage life science, cell and gene therapy companies face a long and complex path to product commercialization,” said ThermoGenesis CEO Chris Xu, at a grand opening event Thursday. “There is a critical unmet need in manufacturing, and that is what we are trying to do here.”
Xu said companies working on the cutting edge of medicine often struggle toward commercialization with limited budgets, so access to shared spaces should be an attractive option.
By sharing access to expensive infrastructure and equipment, startups benefit from a fully outfitted lab without having to pay to open or equip it themselves.
The construction of the new shared lab operation cost about $8 million so far, said Haihong Zhu, chief operating officer with ThermoGenesis (Nasdaq: THMO).
The ReadyStart CleanRooms and IncuStart Wet Labs are in a 35,500-square-foot building at 2890 Kilgore Road. It's a separate location from ThermoGenesis' local offices and manufacturing line, also in Rancho Cordova on Citrus Road, where it makes automated cell separation and storage equipment.
Zhu said she anticipates leasing out bench space primarily to early-stage life science, immunotherapy and cell gene therapy companies. Those early-stage companies can then graduate to private lab space in another part the building. They can eventually move on to testing or manufacturing in the same building. ThermoGenesis' 40 employees will assist tenants in the labs if they need support, she said.
The IncuStart Wet Labs have 26 spaces of rentable 6-foot sections of bench space.
The Greater Sacramento Economic Council, which recruits companies to locate in Sacramento, often gets inquiries about wet-lab space locally, said Michelle Willard, the council's public affairs officer. Now it has space that it can point companies toward, she said. “We love to recruit biotechnology companies to the region."
The building also has cell culture rooms and flexible office spaces, meeting spaces and access to a loading dock and warehouse space. It also has freezers and scientific refrigerators as well as cryogenic storage. Some rooms have biosafety cabinets, incubators, autoclaves and centrifuges, among other equipment.
ThermoGenesis has been in business for 37 years, and the company has seen many changes in the industry, Xu said. “We were a critical supplier to the cell therapy industry … before there was a cell therapy industry.”
The cell therapy industry has many small startups, and those companies often need access to places to do their work. That work then leads to a need to manufacture products in clean-room environments, Xu said.
Cell gene therapy, which use a patient’s own cells to create drugs, is a fast-growing field. Companies that work on those therapies need clean rooms to culture and manufacture them.
The location of the new wet labs and clean rooms is just 10 miles east of where the University of California Davis is building Aggie Square, a medical and biotech hub in Sacramento.
Zhu said she anticipates the new labs will get work associated with research or developments at Aggie Square, and together they will be able to provide jobs to graduates out of UC Davis and California State University Sacramento. Many of those graduates in recent years have been lured to biotech hubs in the Bay Area or San Diego,
"We would like to be able to keep the talent here. We want to make this more of an environment for high tech, with a price way below the Bay Area," Zhu said.
