Capsida Opens Gene Therapy Plant

Biotechnology company Capsida Biotherapeutics opened its gene therapy manufacturing facility in Thousand Oaks just two years after the company’s founding.The 15,000-square-foot facility cuts out the manufacturing middleman for Capsida and will enable the company to bring products from discovery into clinical studies faster.“Our robust process development and analytical capabilities are cornerstones of our ability to reliably produce high-quality gene therapies to meet worldwide regulatory expectations,” Rayne Waller, Capsida’s chief manufacturing officer, said in a statement. Prior to joining Capsida, Waller was with Thousand Oaks-based Amgen Inc.’s manufacturing and supply chain divisions.The manufacturing site includes an in-house quality-control laboratory, two ballroom production suites and a fill suite for the packaging of drugs. It will employ up to 55 people and is designed to include unidirectional airflow for its staff and raw materials, increasing environmental control.Single-use equipment will be leveraged by Capsida’s proprietary manufacturing process to enable quick and efficient product changeovers and equipment cleaning.Rob Murphy, Capsida’s vice president of manufacturing, said in a statement that the facility went from detailed design to mechanical completion in less than a year. “The faster we are able to produce clinical supplies, the faster we’ll be able to get our innovative gene therapies to the patients who need them,” he explained.Capsida’s adeno-associated virus engineering platform, or AAV, generates capsids – protein shells around a virus – that are optimized to target specific tissue. These gene therapies are used to treat central nervous system and non-CNS diseases.The AAV platform was a crux of confidence for Capsida’s Series A investors, Westlake Village Biopartners and Versant Ventures, which together contributed $50 million in funding for Capsida. At the same time the $50 million in funding was announced, an additional $90 million was contributed by biopharmaceutical company AbbVie through a partnership.The facility’s opening ceremony was hosted just an hour before Takeda Pharmaceutical Co.’s had a groundbreaking ceremony of its own, for an expansion of its manufacturing facility just a mile up the road from the Capsida site.“Thousand Oaks is quickly becoming an integral part of the greater Los Angeles biotech hub and Capsida’s leading-edge gene therapy capability will attract a breadth of high-quality talent to the city of Thousand Oaks,” Thousand Oaks Mayor Claudia Bill-de la Peña said in a statement.