IDT opens new therapeutic manufacturing facility

A new facility for Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT) highlights an important milestone for the 35-year-old company, marking its move into the clinical manufacturing and therapeutic space. IDT, a global genomics solutions provider and an operating company in the Life Sciences segment of Danaher Corporation, celebrated its grand opening at 2400 Oakdale Blvd., Coralville, with a ribbon cutting ceremony Oct. 17. At the new location, IDT will make custom therapeutic oligonucleotide, current Good Manufacturing Practice (cGMP) nucleic acids that will be used to assist with the therapeutics side of gene editing.

“This building is not just an expansion of our footprint,” said IDT President Demaris Mills at the ceremony. “We're intentionally creating more space for our team to harness the power of CRISPR. “CRISPR is revolutionizing medicine by creating more opportunities to transform genetic research, and discovery is also enabling entirely new approaches for improving diagnosis and treatment.” CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), a subset of gene editing, is a technology that research scientists use to selectively modify the DNA of living organisms.

New facility

The newly renovated facility is 41,000 square feet and features ISO-8 clean rooms, purification suites, chemical distribution and storage rooms, one quality control lab, five analytical lab spaces for product testing, ancillary and office spaces and shell space for future expansion.

The facility’s cost has been $26 million to date, though IDT anticipates this number to increase as it continues to build out additional spaces. Extensive remodeling began July 2021, with the facility fully operational in July 2023. “The objective for our facility would be to extend and support other areas of gene editing and other areas of functional genomics as we go forward,” said Sandy Ottensmann, VP/GM, gene writing and editing & core/PCR business units at IDT. IDT employs 2,300 people globally. Thanks to the new facility, an estimated 100 additional jobs will be made available by 2026.

‘Making the world a better place’

IDT built the facility to accelerate the pace of genomics and better support its customers, giving them a single provider to supply cGMP quality material so researchers can advance through the necessary clinical trial phases to a commercialized therapeutic. “If you think about early stage research, using lots of different providers for lots of components is okay. But as you get to higher risk products, products that are going to go into a person, everything that we can do to make sure that we provide the safest possible solution for our customers – that's on us,” said Ms. Mills. Being a single provider will reduce risks IDT’s customers assume during their research journey and give them peace of mind, given the quality processes and detailed documentation IDT follows. In addition, the company offers testing, support teams, and regulatory guidance for researchers, which will help them move rapidly from the lab to life-changing advances, such as developing curative therapies rather than exclusively treating disease.

Mark Behlke, IDT’s chief scientific officer, expressed excitement that customers will be using their products to develop therapies to treat human genetic-based diseases that were untreatable in the past. “There was no hope for these things,” he said during the ceremony. “I can say that I sleep better at night, knowing that the work I do makes the world a better place in our own small way.”