MultiCell Moves: Larger facilities will support expanding research programs

LINCOLN, R.I. —MultiCell Technologies, which develops liver cell-based products for commercial and therapeutic applications, relocated its offices and laboratory into larger, more modern facilities in mid-April.

The move to the new 5,572-square-foot facility here will provide administrative and laboratory space "suitable for R&D, but also for growing the cells to meet the projected demands we expect in the not-so-distant future," says Barbara Corbett, MultiCell's investor relations manager. "The new facility is perfectly suited to liver stem cell development and growing the cells we market to companies like Pfizer and a Japanese pharmaceutical company for drug-discovery testing.

"Our licensee, XenoTech in Kansas City, indicated it did not have the space to grow to meet our anticipated need. We were talking about subcontracting to a facility near them, but decided to use our own lab space to control our own cell growth. We hope this will make a difference for speedy delivery of future orders."

The expansion will expedite developing liver cell-based products for commercial and therapeutic applications, commercial production of its immortalized hepatic cell lines and therapeutic protein products and technology.

"First we are a research facility and this [expansion] will allow us to bring things in-house that we were contracting to outsiders because we did not have the right equipment nor the space," Newmin explained of the move. "Second, and probably more importantly, we will have space to actually manufacture cells, which we did not have before. We expect to be ramping up production of cells in-house that were subcontracted to our licensee."