Touchlight creates one of the largest DNA manufacturing facilities

British DNA producer Touchlight announced that it has completed the redevelopment and expansion of its UK manufacturing facility.

The expanded state-of-the-art facility’s manufacturing capacity has tripled and is now capable of producing more than 8kg a year. This exceeds the current, but growing, global supply of plasmid DNA for genetic medicine. The new facility has 11 suites and includes two class B filling suites with class A filling cabinets, warehousing, together with a quality control laboratory capability and has already received a successful customer quality audit from a Big Pharma company.

The company noted that its proprietary doggybone DNA (dbDNA) overcomes the technical challenges associated with efficiently mass-producing plasmid DNA. The patented dbDNA technology produces a minimal, linear, double stranded, covalently closed DNA vector through an enzymatic manufacturing process. dbDNA is uniquely positioned for the rapid, synthetic, and scalable manufacture of GMP DNA using a small, simple footprint. The technology can incorporate genes from 500bp to 20kb and accommodate sequences typically unstable as plasmid DNA in E. coli, such as those found in viral vector and mRNA production.