TreeFrog opens stem cell manufacturing facility
TreeFrog Therapeutics was founded in November 2018 and, this month, managed to complete work on its own manufacturing facility. The company’s 26 staff members will also be housed in the same site.
The facility is based in Bordeaux, France, and covers 13,000-square-feet. The space will be utilized in the development and scale-up of cell therapy manufacturing processes, including the use of human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells.
According to TreeFrog, its 3D cell culture technology allows for mass productions of cellular products whilst operating with a reduced footprint.
Kevin Alessandri, CEO of TreeFrog Therapeutics, said, “We strongly believe that our technology is set to become a dominant design for cell therapy manufacturing, because it allows [companies] to maintain cost-efficient production units in high-income countries.”
COO of TreeFrog, Michael Fidalgo, stated that the production technology enables the production of several billion cells in good manufacturing practice (GMP)-like conditions at the early development stages.
TreeFrog has its own pipeline of therapeutics that it is building out. At present, it has one iPSC-based cell therapy for Huntington/Parkinson’s disease at the preclinical stage, as well as various therapies at the discovery stage for heart failure and diabetes, among others.
Fidalgo noted that the current facility operates as a ‘scale-up- lab’ and any therapies that show promise to be taken into clinical studies will be transferred to GMP-compliant manufacturing sites.
Below is a 360° view of the completed site:
