Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

AstraZeneca is continuing to build on the drug discovery prospects offered by Cambridge Antibody Technology and has acquired a biologics manufacturing facility in Montreal, Canada, from DSM Biologics Inc.

Work will start to re-commission the 66,000 sq ft facility and have it ready to commence full scale production of antibody drug candidates for clinical trials by 2009, serving the whole of the AstraZeneca group. No price was disclosed for the acquisition.

Dr John Patterson, AstraZeneca’s executive director, development, said: “This is a further step in our global plan to accelerate the delivery of promising pre-clinical bioph-armaceutical candidate drugs into our development portfolio.

“It extends the set of supply capabilities we have assembled through MedImmune and Cambridge Antibody Technology (CAT) and takes advantage of the biotechnology skills in Quebec.”

Mark Jones, AstraZeneca Canada’s president and CEO, said: “Ultimately, this investment will help strengthen our pipeline by building a larger portfolio of biological drugs so that we can deliver valued medicines to patients.”

CAT is a leader in the discovery and development of human therapeutic antibodies and has an advanced proprietary platform technology for rapidly isolating human monoclonal antibodies using phage display and ribosome display systems.

It was acquired a year ago by AstraZeneca for £702 million as the global pharmaceutical sought to replenish a depleted product pipeline.

The business is now being tied in with $15.2bn acquisition, MedImmune, to create a world-beating fully integrated biologics and vaccines business.