Gilead’s Kite Expands Cell Therapy Facilities in US, Europe

On May 15, 2018, Gilead Sciences’ Kite Pharma announced that it has leased and purchased new facilities in the United States and Europe to expand its cell therapy pipeline.

The 117,000-square-foot leased facility in Hoofddorp, the Netherlands will engineer and produce cell therapies, including axicabtagene ciloleucel, a chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy that is currently under review by the European Medicines Agency and was approved by FDA as Yescarta in October 2017. The facility is expected to be fully operational in 2020 and will create more than 300 jobs.

In the US, Kite purchased a new building in Santa Monica, CA, from Astellas Pharma in April 2018 that will be used for cell therapy research, development, and the expansion of clinical manufacturing capabilities. Kite has also leased a 26,000-square-foot facility in Gaithersburg, MD, to support the work of a new cooperative research and development agreement with the National Cancer Institute to develop adoptive cell therapies targeting patient-specific tumor neoantigens. Neoantigens are mutations found on the surface of cancer cells that are unique to each person and tumor, offering the potential for more targeted antitumor activity, according to Gilead.