OREANDA-NEWS. JHL Biotech won the 2016 BioProcessing International award for Excellence in Facility Design or Retrofit.

The award, granted annually, recognizes a company for expanding the boundaries of bioprocessing facility design and construction. JHL was granted the award for groundbreaking use of innovative design and technology at its facility in Wuhan, China.

JHL’s Wuhan manufacturing plant was designed to support annual production of up to 250kg of monoclonal antibodies. The factory was built in 18 months using a new prefabricated, off-the-shelf construction concept from GE Healthcare, called KUBio™, which is significantly faster than the usual three years required for traditional stick-built methods. The factory building is made of modules that were prebuilt in Germany and then transported to the site China, where it was reassembled in eight days. The facility also makes use of GE’s biomanufacturing platform based on single-use manufacturing technologies, called FlexFactory™. FlexFactory is a suite of single-use bioreactor, harvest, and purification technologies and services whose primary advantage over traditional bioprocessing systems is decreased upfront costs, faster product change-over, and dramatically simpler operating procedures.

JHL is honored to receive recognition for its work and attributes its success to the fantastic team the company has built and to its longstanding partnership with GE. “This award is recognition of the countless hours our team has dedicated to the dream of making world-class therapies affordable to all,” said Racho Jordanov, CEO of JHL, “and it is also recognition of the wonderful work our colleagues at GE have done on our behalf. GE and JHL started working together four years ago, when GE provided FlexFactory systems for our pilot-scale plant in Taiwan. Three years after opening that facility, JHL and GE are celebrating another milestone. GE’s innovative facility design and bioprocessing solutions have allowed us to save a significant amount of time in conceptualization and construction, allowing our therapies to move into the clinic earlier than would have otherwise been possible.”

About JHL Biotech

JHL Biotech Inc. (Stock Code: 6540.TWO) is a biopharmaceutical startup founded by a group of biotech industry veterans with deep experience in pharmaceutical development and operations. JHL is backed by premier financial firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, Biomark Capital, Milestone Capital, Fidelity, and the China Development Industrial Bank.