UCLA receives $7.3 million grant to build state-of-the-art facility for developing gene, cell therapies

UCLA has received a $7.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to build a state-of-the-art facility in which to produce gene and cell therapies aimed at treating a host of illnesses and conditions.The new 13,000-square-foot facility, to be constructed in UCLA ’s Center for the Health Sciences, will provide a highly regulated environment with features such as systems to manage air flow and filtering, laboratory spaces and bioreactors. The new facility is expected to be ready for use in 2023.“This grant provides critical funds to build a facility that will enable the development of a new generation of cellular therapies for cancer and other deadly diseases,” said Dr. Antoni Ribas, a UCLA professor of medicine and director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy Center at U CLA.The new facility will be built according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration  good manufacturing practices, a set of guidelines intended to ensure that facilities producing products for human use are built to maximize safety and effectiveness, and to reduce the risk for contamination.It will replace a facility in UCLA ’s Factor Building that UCLA scientists currently use for similar research. But that space, which was put together by combining existing research laboratories, lacks the capacity to process certain cells and handle other bioengineered products, and it cannot accommodate the growing number of UCLA scientists pursuing research on gene and cell therapies, said...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news