Bill Swaney has been appointed as the vice president of manufacturing at Expression Therapeutics. He comes to the company from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center where he was the director of the Vector Production Facility & Viral Vector Core. Swaney is an expert in GMP cell and gene therapy manufacturing and has conducted over 70 GMP production runs for academic and commercial clients.
 
“We are pleased to welcome Bill, a pioneer in cell and gene therapy manufacturing, to Expression Therapeutics. Under his leadership, we now have a complete manufacturing team, making us one of the few biotechnology companies with its own therapeutic pipeline and in-house manufacturing, with the capability to provide CDMO services to commercial clients,” said Mohan Rao, Ph.D., CEO of Expression Therapeutics.
 
New Manufacturing Facility
 
Expression Therapeutics has also announced the construction of a 43,000-sq ft manufacturing facility in Cincinnati, Ohio. The facility will manufacture lentiviral (LV), retroviral (RV), and adeno associated viral (AAV) GMP vectors, with a mix of 30-180 liter runs in cell stacks and up to 1,000 liter runs in bioreactors, and will have the capability to manufacture up to 100 GMP vector products per year. Additionally, it provides the necessary infrastructure to fulfill Expression Therapeutics’ ex vivo cell processing and recombinant protein production needs. Expression Therapeutics is using prefabricated PODs from G-CON Manufacturing, Inc. for its ISO Class 7 cleanroom suites.
 
“We decided to utilize advanced pre-built modular cleanrooms from G-CON to accelerate our buildout and commence vector manufacturing this year. With vector GMP manufacturing backlogs today typically exceeding 18 months, we wanted to bring on additional capacity as soon as possible to serve clients,” Swaney commented.