Lonza Pharma & Biotech has opened its Collaborative Innovation Center (CIC) in the Haifa Life Science Park, Israel. The CIC acts as a hub for partnerships that aim to identify and accelerate new solutions for biopharma manufacturing.
 
The 10,764 ft² facility, including lab space equipped with bioprocessing and analytical equipment, is being made available to collaborating partners as a test bed for new ideas and technology. In addition to infrastructure, Lonza will make funding and in-house expertise available for collaborative research into strategic areas of application relevant to a variety of biopharma development needs.
 
“Israel has established itself as a point of convergence for digital technologies, engineering and life sciences, providing new solutions for healthcare in particular,” said Marc Funk, chief operating officer of Lonza Pharma & Biotech. “We want to expand this potential to reimagine the development and manufacturing of future medicines by working with academic institutions, teaching hospitals and startups.”
 
The CIC is currently collaborating with leading institutions in Israel on research projects in three key focus areas: expression systems and synthetic biology, cell and gene therapies, and data acquisition and analytics 
 
Several projects are currently underway including with the Center for Regenerative Medicine, Stem Cell and Tissue Engineering at the Chaim Sheba Medical Center, a leader in the field of CAR-T therapies. Lonza and Sheba will be working together to evaluate and test the Cocoon manufacturing technology, a patient-scale, closed and automated cell-therapy manufacturing system.
 
“Advanced autologous cell therapies are growing to become a major part of future medicine. High-quality manufacturing at point-of-care, is a key challenge in making these applicable,” said Dr. Elad Jacoby, Sheba Medical Center. “We have treated more than 60 children and young adults with leukemia and lymphoma with CAR-T cells, which makes Sheba Medical Center the ideal place to help drive new technologies that could extend treatment to even more young people,” he added. “The collaboration with Lonza will enable us to develop a growing platform for production of CAR-T and other cell therapies.”
 
The CIC will be run by Dr. Frida Grynspan-Gotlieb, who brings her extensive R&D experience in the Israeli biotech and life sciences sectors.