Kaneka Eurogentec nominated for the 2019 Essenscia Innovation Award
Eurogentec was the finalist in the contest for its innovation in the manufacturing of plasmid at kg scale in one same batch
Seraing, Belgium, April 2nd 2019 - Kaneka Eurogentec, a custom service and FDA inspected contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) for Biopharmaceuticals, has been nominated for Essenscia Innovation Award 2019.
The innovation developed by Eurogentec is a manufacturing process to produce circular DNA molecules, named plasmids. These molecules are used by Biopharmaceutical industry for development of new vaccines and therapeutics. Plasmid DNA isolation and purification methods are well known by molecular biologists active in Life Sciences Research. They are used to produce plasmids in their laboratories but at mg scale.
Eurogentec has developed a process to produce these plasmids at kg scale, 1 million times higher, in a few days only.
Such a process scale-up had to be done in compliance with the stringent purity and quality specifications required by regulatory authorities such US FDA or European Medicines Agency. It was a real challenge Eurogentec took up and succeeded. The innovation allows to produce 1 kg per batch that represents 1 million doses of plasmid, it is unique worldwide.
This will allow Eurogentec to produce innovative therapeutics for various medical indications such as gene therapy, cancer vaccines, allergies, cardiovascular or metabolic disorder.
In addition, the process Eurogentec has developed has been optimized to decrease volumes of liquids and quantities of raw materials, so decreasing cost of production and waste release into the environment.
“Our researchers had to be creative and they implemented together with Production team innovative solutions to make this manufacturing feasible. Going further, they also optimized it and developed the most cost effective and the highest scalable process.” Stated Florence Xhonneux, Director R&D and Innovation.
This innovation positions Eurogentec as the leader in the worldwide market, ahead of its competitors and technologies developed by Big Pharma. Thanks to this success, Eurogentec invested in several capacity expansions.
Lieven Janssens, President explained that “A second investment step of 45 million Euros is ongoing with the building of a new plant, just beside the existing one, in Liege Science Park, to multiply by 5 the highest scale of the current production unit capacities and will double the number of employees working in that Division, with a hundred of new jobs created by 2020.
Together with Kaneka Eurogentec, Kaneka Belgium has also been nominated for the Essenscia Innovation Award.
