June 12, 2020 - Kite, a Gilead company and AmCham Member, announced today that its production facility for CAR T-cell therapy in Hoofddorp is now fully operational after recent EMA approval for this groundbreaking cure. Kite is a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Santa Monica, California, and is engaged in the development of innovative cancer treatments. The company focuses on producing cell therapies in which the patient’s immune cells are engineered specifically to recognise and then attack the cancer cells. With this new production facility in the Netherlands, the CAR T-cells will be available quicker for patients in Europe which ensures that the treatment process for patients can be shortened.
The facility in Hoofddorp is unique and is a great example of Kite's (and Gilead's) commitment to the Dutch economy and healthcare ecosystem. AmCham is proud that innovative companies like Kite and Gilead invest in the Netherlands to further expand the base for such leading-edge activities.
AmCham congratulates Kite on this exceptional achievement!
Please read the full press release below.
New Dutch facility for innovative CAR T-cell therapy opens in Hoofddorp to treat European patients
Hoofddorp – 12 juni 2020 – Kite, a Gilead company, announced today that its production facility for CAR T-cell therapy in Hoofddorp is fully operational as from today. The facility was designed and built specifically to produce individualised CAR T-cell therapies for European patients with certain types of blood cancer*. Current capacity allows the production of 4,000 therapies per year, and there is room to further expand capacity in the future.
CAR T-cell therapy is an individualised therapy that is tailor-made for each patient. After isolating specific immune cells from the patient’s blood, the cells are engineered to recognise and attack cancer cells after reintroduction in the patient.
Using an investment of €130 million and two years of time, Kite transformed a 19,000-square-metre building into a high-tech CAR T-cell therapy production facility. This new location currently offers jobs to over 400 highly qualified employees from more than 20 countries. By the end of next year, the number of jobs is expected to rise to 530. Kite now has nearly 90 qualified treatment centres in 16 countries throughout Europe and Israel, including several centres in the Netherlands.
‘We are extremely proud that it’s now possible to produce cell therapy in the Netherlands for patients all over Europe,’ says Christi Shaw, Chief Executive Officer at Kite. ‘Because the production process can now take place entirely in the Netherlands, the time it takes to provide the therapy for patients can be shortened by almost a week.’
‘This is a huge leap forward in the process of providing CAR T-cell therapy to European patients who qualify for the therapy,’ says Louis van de Wiel, Site Head and Vice President of Operations. ‘Until recently, the cells of each individual patient were still sent to our production facility in Los Angeles, US.
‘A quicker throughput time is very important to these patients, because it’s precisely this group who need fast treatment and have usually run out of other options,’ says Professor Marie José Kersten, MD, PhD, Amsterdam University Medical Centres. ‘The fact that the CAR T-cells will now be available quicker is vitally important to the patients.’
The production of CAR T-cell therapies for European treatment centres will be scaled up in stages.
* adult patients with recurrent or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) and primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma (PMBCL) after two or more lines of systemic therapy.
