Maravai LifeSciences, a global provider of life science reagents and services, is expanding its contract development and manufacturing organization capabilities at TriLink BioTechnologies for the second time in less than a year. The expansion is expected to be completed in 1Q21 and will increase TriLink’s small molecule manufacturing capacity for additional scale-up of CleanCap, its messenger RNA (mRNA) capping technology, for global mRNA vaccine and therapeutic programs. The company is also currently completing the construction of its plasmid DNA production facility.

Last November, TriLink opened their new headquarters in San Diego, CA and expanded mRNA and small molecule capacity with five cGMP suites. The current investment will further expand the operation with an additional three cGMP suites and four cGMP manufacturing support suites.

The expansion positions TriLink to meet global demand for research- and GMP-grade CleanCap capping reagent, nucleoside triphosphates (NTPs) and development and cGMP services for mRNA therapeutics and vaccine production. The increase in demand for these critical raw materials and APIs is being driven by COVID-19 vaccine development as well as the rapid growth in investigational mRNA therapeutics and advancements in gene editing and cell therapy such as CRISPR, base editors and CAR-T therapies.

CleanCap is a co-transcriptional 5′ capping technology that generates a natural Cap 1 structure with higher mRNA capping efficiencies. CleanCap is designed to increase mRNA yields during transcription, simplify and shorten the mRNA manufacturing process resulting in higher levels of protein production. TriLink has developed a suite of CleanCap analogs that are tailormade for therapeutics and vaccines.

TriLink recently entered a collaboration with Imperial College London (ICL) to manufacture saRNA for ICL’s COVID-19 vaccine project.