Cardinal Health Collaborates with Centocor

PharmaManufacturing.com
01/06/2006

Dublin, Ohio-based health care products supplier Cardinal Health announced Jan. 6 that it has entered into a feasibility and commercial option agreement with Centocor, Inc. (Malvern, Pa.) to develop cell lines using Cardinal’s Gene Product Expression (GPEx) cell line engineering technology. Cardinal Health will use its patented GPEx technology to engineer cell lines expressing undisclosed Centocor monoclonal antibodies.

Cardinal Health’s GPEx technology enables rapid genetic engineering of stable mammalian cell lines. These cell lines are used to produce human proteins and antibodies, which belong to the rapidly growing class of medicines known as biopharmaceuticals.

“We are very pleased that Centocor, with their great depth of experience and success in the areas of both antibody R&D and commercialization, has chosen to evaluate our GPEx technology with several of their antibodies,” said Paul Weiss, PhD, president of Cardinal Health’s biopharmaceutical development services center in Middleton, Wis. “We have made great progress in developing both the GPEx technology, as well as our manufacturing capabilities, especially for antibodies, and are looking forward to proving our ability to rapidly engineer stable, high expressing cell lines for Centocor to evaluate.”

In addition to enabling rapid cell line development and availability of candidate gene products, the GPEx technology is well suited for both efficient pilot and large-scale production of antibodies and other therapeutic recombinant proteins.

Through insertion of multiple copies of the gene, GPEx can generate, in as little as half the time required using traditional methods, stable cell lines that exhibit significantly higher levels of expression than those cell lines generated by other methods.

Cardinal Health has integrated the GPEx technology with clinical scale mammalian cell culture manufacturing to provide a more rapid way for its clients to bring biopharmaceutical products into clinical development.

“This is an exciting time for Cardinal Health to be working in the biotechnology market, and to be offering services such as our GPEx technology to collaborators such as Centocor,” said John Lowry, president and COO of the Pharmaceutical Technologies and Services group of Cardinal Health. “As we continue to integrate these services, we are creating an offering that is unmatched in terms of breadth for both clinical and commercial projects, as we can literally go from the gene for an antibody to packaged vials distributed to the clinicCell-line Development Financial terms of the agreement between Centocor and Cardinal Health were not disclosed, and Centocor does have the option of expanding the collaboration depending on the evaluation of these first GPEx cell lines.

More information about Cardinal Health may be found at www.cardinalhealth.com. To learn more about Centocor, visit www.centocor.com.