February 9, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
SEATTLE – Juno Therapeutics will open a new facility in Washington to manufacture the company’s cell therapy products, the company announced Monday morning.
The new facility will support Juno’s planned JCAR015 multicenter clinical trial, additional clinical programs in Juno‘s pipeline and the company’s first commercial products, the company announced. The site will be in Bothell, Wash. and is expected to come online in 2016.
Juno is developing cell-based cancer immunotherapies based on chimeric antigen receptor and high-affinity T cell receptor technologies to genetically engineer T cells to recognize and kill cancer. JCAR015 is Juno’s chimeric antigen receptor product candidate indicated for the treatment of relapsed or refractory B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. JCAR015 is currently the subject of a Phase I trial, which is designed to determine the safety and appropriate dose of modified T cells in patients. Chimeric antigen receptor technology employs the body’s immune system to attack cancer cells. JCAR014, JCAR016 and JCAR017 are also Juno CAR-T cell product candidates in current levels of testing.
“The Bothell manufacturing facility is an important milestone for Juno,” Hans Bishop, CEO and president of Juno said in a press release. “The manufacturing expertise we are developing is key to our long term success, increasing our ability to run multiple clinical trials and commercialize our pipeline, and as a platform to introduce the various innovations we are investing in to optimize patient outcomes.”
Juno officials did not specify where the new site would be, nor did it say how many new positions may be created to support the work at the site. However, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said the facility will not only provide life-saving treatments, but will “produce high wage jobs for the region.” Last year Bothell lost more than 600 jobs when biotech company Amgen shuttered its Bothell and Seattle sites. Additionally AMRI, which provides contract research and development services to biotech and pharmaceutical companies, closed its Bothell site in 2012, eliminating 24 positions.
The company announced it will continue to work with its existing contract manufacturing partners to augment its manufacturing capabilities. Among other advantages, this will enhance flexibility, provide redundancy, and increase capacity in a cost effective manner, company officials said.
Juno was established in 2013 as a spin-out of the Seattle-based nonprofit Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The company went public last year trading under the symbol “JUNO” on The NASDAQ Global Select Market.
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