Seattle-based Sana Biotechnology Inc. (Nasdaq: SANA) is starting to make inroads in Bothell.
The biotech officially opened its 80,000-square-foot manufacturing facility Friday in the Eastside town, where it now has about 30 people working. In the coming months, Sana co-founder and CEO Steve Harr expects to have more than 60 workers at the Bothell facility, which Sana started building in July 2023.
The Bothell facility, in the Alexandria Center for Advanced Technologies at 3555 Monte Villa Parkway, replaced plans for a larger Sana facility in Fremont, California. Harr said Sana had the right expertise in the Seattle area for the facility to end up here, plus the company had a good relationship with landlord Alexandria Real Estate.
Harr expects Sana will save about $100 million over a three-year period by choosing Bothell instead of Fremont, California.
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Bringing manufacturing in-house is a significant step for an early-stage biotech like Sana.
"First of all, we had to decide if we wanted to do it, because it's really expensive, and for an early-stage company, capital is expensive," Harr said. "We had to convince ourselves it really improved our probability of success."
Sana has a Seattle office in Eastlake, as well as offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and South San Francisco. Harr said outside of Bothell is where Sana has research labs, drug development and the infrastructure of the company, while the Bothell facility is strictly for manufacturing drugs that already have a locked process.
In five-plus years, Harr said Sana aims to have hundreds of employees working out of Bothell. It takes about 18 to 20 months between taking possession of a facility and making drugs there that end up in patients, as biotechs need to hit milestones around sterility, airflow, engineering runs and manufacturing runs.
Harr said Sana wanted a facility in an area with a strong workforce and good partnerships with local government. The space was an old AT&T call center, which provided good bones for backup power.
Sana was launched by former Juno Therapeutics executives, Harr and Hans Bishop, in 2019. The company is focused on repairing and controlling genes in cells, and its treatments are aimed at cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases and central nervous system diseases.
In the fourth quarter of 2023, Sana laid off almost 130 workers. The company, through an underwritten public offering in February, raised $165 million, before underwriting discounts, commissions and other expenses.
Sana had 328 employees at the end of last year, according to a regulatory filing. The biotech had $681.4 million in assets at the end of March, up from $565.3 million at the end of last year.
Before Sana, Harr was the chief financial officer at Juno, which was acquired by Celgene for $9 billion in 2018. He said the biggest difference between Juno and Sana was that Juno's drugs had already shown promise in academic settings before the company officially launched.
"Sana was started as an idea," Harr said. "We're just getting into, five years later, really understanding what's happening with these medicines in people."
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