Arranta Bio, a microbiome contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), has added a 130,000 square foot facility in Boxborough, MA, to complement its existing facilities in Watertown, MA and Gainesville, FL, bringing the total manufacturing capacity at Arranta to over 230,000 square feet. Arranta closed an oversubscribed Series B equity financing from its current investors to fund the expansion.
 
The Boxborough site will be developed in phases, and work on the first two phases has begun. Total investment in Boxborough is expected to exceed $150 million, and with the first phases of construction underway, start-up of GMP suites is expected early in 2022. The facility will employ more than 250 people, and is designed to flexibly support clients, including dedicated lab and GMP capacity that can support commercial products or a pipeline of products for a client. The GMP manufacturing suites are designed to be flexible in scale, size and design to accommodate client and product-specific processing requirements for both drug substance and finished drug product. Initial multi-client capacity will include up to multiple 2,000L scale single-use bioreactors for anaerobic bacteria or 1,000L scale single-use fermenters for aerobic bacteria and fully automated drug product manufacturing. Additionally, Arranta plans to add secondary packaging and labeling capabilities at the facility. 
 
“We are excited by the recent clinical results that demonstrate the potential of microbiome therapies to positively impact patient outcomes in a broad range of diseases,” Mark Bamforth, executive chair and chief executive officer, Arranta Bio. “This new facility demonstrates Arranta’s commitment to support the increasing maturity of the microbiome live biotherapeutic product sector by offering innovators best-in-class development and GMP manufacturing capabilities that support their programs from lab to market.”
 
David Stevens, president and chief operating officer, Arranta Bio, said, “In discussions with leading microbiome innovators, we see strong interest in dedicated client capacity and new manufacturing capabilities to meet the commercial supply needs of this sector. We are continuing to expand our organization, adding experience and skills to meet clients’ needs, and expect to have over 200 on our team by the end of 2021 and up to 500 employees once fully staffed.”
 
Arranta invested more than $100 million in 2020 to expand its process development and early clinical GMP supply capacity at its campus in Gainesville, and established a state-of-the-art, multi-product, commercial-ready manufacturing facility in Watertown. The Watertown facility was completed at the end of 2020 and is now being commissioned to supply live biotherapeutic products (LBPs) to microbiome innovator companies.
 
“We are delighted to have the continued support and enthusiasm of our existing shareholders, who over-subscribed in a Series B equity financing round, which will be used to fund the initial build-out and start-up of the Boxborough facility and to fuel additional long-term growth for Arranta,” said Steven Favaloro, chief financial officer, Arranta Bio.
 
The amount raised was not disclosed.
 
About 400 companies are actively exploring the linkage between diseases and the microbiome—millions of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and viruses that live inside and on the human body—in order to identify therapeutic targets. Scientists have called the microbiome the second genome. In fact, the number of genes in the microbes making up one person’s microbiome is estimated to be at least 200 times the number in the human genome.
 
In the past decade, the industry has experienced a rapid acceleration in scientific understanding of the composition and functions of gut microbiota.