A month af­ter un­veil­ing plans for a new man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty in Gene­va, KBI Bio­phar­ma has al­ready pegged the lo­ca­tion for its next site: a $150 mil­lion fa­cil­i­ty in Re­search Tri­an­gle Park, North Car­oli­na.

The 140,000-square-foot fa­cil­i­ty will be ful­ly op­er­a­tional by Q1 2022, and the con­tract ser­vices com­pa­ny says it will be home to more than 200 op­er­a­tions and qual­i­ty as­sur­ance staffers. A mys­tery part­ner is chip­ping in on the fa­cil­i­ty to man­u­fac­ture its pro­tein ther­a­pies, though KBI is keep­ing mum about who.

“Ex­pan­sion of our US-based cell cul­ture op­er­a­tions is a key in­vest­ment to sup­port our client’s com­mer­cial­iza­tion strate­gies,” KBI pres­i­dent and CEO Dirk Lange said in a state­ment.

The new site is about a five-minute dri­ve from Pa­tri­ot Park, where KBI’s mam­malian drug de­vel­op­ment labs are al­ready lo­cat­ed. The com­pa­ny says its new fa­cil­i­ty will house up to six 2,000-liter, sin­gle-use biore­ac­tor sys­tems and as­so­ci­at­ed har­vest and pu­rifi­ca­tion equip­ment, which could pump out more than 100 com­mer­cial batch­es a year. KBI tout­ed that the fa­cil­i­ty will al­so in­clude elec­tron­ic batch records, elec­tron­ic log­books, pa­per­less ma­te­ri­als man­age­ment and Lab­o­ra­to­ry In­for­ma­tion Man­age­ment Sys­tems (LIMS) for qual­i­ty con­trol da­ta man­age­ment.

“By ex­pand­ing our com­mer­cial man­u­fac­tur­ing foot­print with this fa­cil­i­ty, we are able to pro­vide our part­ners with launch ma­te­r­i­al and mar­ket sup­ply,” Lange said. “We chose to build this new fa­cil­i­ty in the Re­search Tri­an­gle Park be­cause it gives us ac­cess to high­ly-spe­cial­ized re­sources. The com­bi­na­tion of tal­ent, tech­ni­cal and aca­d­e­m­ic train­ing in this re­gion is out­stand­ing, which is crit­i­cal as we are ex­pand­ing our im­pact by serv­ing more clients and pa­tients from this new fa­cil­i­ty.”

RTP, close to three of the state’s top re­search uni­ver­si­ties, is home to a grow­ing num­ber of CD­MOs and bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies. Back in Jan­u­ary, Eli Lil­ly re­served $470 mil­lion for a new man­u­fac­tur­ing site in the area to be­gin pro­duc­tion of in­jectable prod­ucts and de­liv­ery de­vices.

Hours before President Biden’s Covid-19 team gave their first virtual press conference, the famed AIDS researcher David Ho delivered concerning news in a new pre-print: SARS-CoV-2 B.1.351, the variant that emerged in South Africa, is “markedly more resistant” to antibodies from convalescent plasma and vaccinated individuals.

The news for several monoclonal antibodies, including Eli Lilly’s bamlanivimab, was even worse: Their ability to neutralize was “completely or markedly abolished,” Ho wrote. Lilly’s antibody cocktail, which was just shown to dramatically reduce the risk of hospitalizations or death, also became far less potent.