Bay Area's AllCells to Open Up Shop in Boston
August 24, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
AllCells, based in Alameda, Calif., announced today that it will be constructing a new clinical collection facility in the Boston, Mass. area.
AllCells provides high purity hematology and immunology cells to pharmaceutical companies and researchers that it acquires from its adjacent blood and bone marrow donor clinics. It also provides a variety of bioservices, such as tissue culture, flow cytometry, and immunoassays.
The new east coast clinic is expected to go live in November, and is expected to “enhance service to life science researchers located throughout U.S. east coast, Europe, and rest of the world.”
In addition to expanding its production capacity for whole bone marrow and leukapheresis products (Leuko Paks), and whole peripheral blood, it plans to “mobilize” donor volunteers “using mobilization agents such as r-GCSF (Neupogen) and/or Plerixafor (Mozobil) to stimulate hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) migration into peripheral blood for subsequent collection/packaging.”
The company also has a second phase of expansion for the AllCells-Boston involving purifying and cryopreserving primary cell types for in-vitro research. It also plans to produce CliniCells for the manufacture of allogeneic cell and gene therapies.
“Our customers depend on these hematology and immunology primary cell products to support their cell-based assay applications in drug discovery and preclinical development work-flows,” said Jay Tong, AllCells’ president and chief executive officer, in a statement. “AllCells-Boston strengthens our business continuity capability enabling us to fill customer orders from two different clinical collection sites. The second site expands the company’s overall donor repository thereby providing customers access to a larger and more diverse human donor pool for procuring relevant phenotypes important for their specific cell-based assay applications. The placement of our tissue collection facilities in Boston, Massachusetts together with current Alameda, California facilities helps assure customers will receive fresh products having the highest possible cell viability.”
In December 2015, the company announced it was expanding into therapeutic applications. It introduced clinical grade products for the further processing of allogeneic cell therapies. It started with standard and custom pack sizes of Clinical Grade Fresh Whole Bone Marrow early this year, and was followed by Clinical Grade Fresh Leuko Pak products.
“AllCells’ commitment and vision is to continue utilizing its strengths in hematology and immunology in ways that can make a greater impact on improving patient health, especially within the area of regenerative medicine,” Tong said in a statement at the time. “By providing a consistently high quality, readily available commercial source of HSC-rich products that comply with US-FDA cellular and tissue therapy regulations, we will help customers accelerate their manufacturing scale-up efforts and development timelines. Moreover, we specialize in handling customized hematologic tissue procurement made possible through LeukoLab—a clinical division of AllCells, in cases where our customers have distinct tissue collection criteria deemed critical for bioprocess requirements and/or product efficacy.”