Dive Brief:
- JSR Corporations' life science division JSR Life Sciences has bought up cell line developer Selexis, with a plan to integrate it into its subsidiary KBI Biopharma, creating a 'gene to GMP' service. No financial details on the sale have been released.
- The Selexis acquisition brings on board the SUREtechnology Platform, which generates cell lines that can express a wide variety of recombinant proteins.
- KBI and Selexis have been working together since 2012, with KBI using Selexis' cell lines in development and manufacturing services.
Dive Insight:
Japanese chemicals company JSR Corporation only moved into biotech in 2015, when it acquired the biopharma contract development and marketing organization (CDMO) KBI Pharma in early 2015. It showed its commitment to this move (or perhaps its preparation for the Selexis acquisition) last month by investing $30 million to boost the manufacturing capacity and capabilities at KBI's sites in Durham, North Carolina and Boulder, Colorado.
KBI's Durham facility now has commercial mammalian cell culture manufacturing capability, along with cGMP cell culture manufacturing lines and recovery and downstream purification suites capable of clinical and commercial production.
The acquisition of Selexis gives JSR and KBI access to mammalian (suspension-adapted CHO-K1) cell-line generation for the production of biologics such as bispecific antibodies, multimeric proteins and Fc-fusion proteins. These are all the essential parts of many of the high-cost therapeutics that are reaching the market.
"Selexis has the best-in-class cell-line development technology and offers the ability to solve some of the most difficult expression challenges in biologics development," said Eric R. Johnson, president of JSR’s Life Sciences division. "The Selexis technologies seamlessly integrate into the biologics development continuum, spanning discovery to commercialization."