Catalent is investing $130 million to add five additional Phase 3 through commercial-scale manufacturing suites to its gene therapy campus in Harmans, MD to support a growing customer pipeline and market demand.

The campus in Harmans, near the Baltimore Washington International (BWI) airport, comprises two state-of-the-art facilities that, when completed, will house a total of 15 gene therapy suites each designed to accommodate multiple bioreactors for commercial supply. The first Harmans/BWI facility on the campus was recently approved by the FDA for commercial manufacturing and is expected to have all 10 cGMP suites qualified and operational by the first quarter of 2021. The five new cGMP suites will be located in an adjacent building on the Harmans campus and are anticipated to be operational in the first half of 2022. The second Harmans building will also offer cold storage warehousing and additional office space.

Catalent’s Harmans/BWI commercial manufacturing campus is equipped with single-use manufacturing technology, and currently includes over 200,000 square feet of late-stage clinical and commercial-stage gene therapy production. Upon outfitting of the second building, the large-scale Harmans/BWI production campus will encompass a total footprint of approximately 350,000 square feet. The campus is one of Catalent’s five gene therapy locations in Maryland and houses multiple cGMP manufacturing suites with pre-seed, bioreactor, and downstream rooms, together with fill/finish, testing, warehousing, supply chain, and central services capabilities.

“It is critical that we stay connected to the needs of our customers as they progress through the clinical pipeline. By increasing our late-stage manufacturing capacity at the Harmans campus, we will be able to meet demand through the medium term and take advantage of our shared resources, including the technical and manufacturing expertise that helped us reach the milestone of becoming an FDA-approved commercial partner,” said Manja Boerman, Ph.D., President, Cell & Gene Therapy at Catalent. “Catalent is committed to this journey with our customers as they bring life-changing therapies to their patients.”