Timeline: Pitt’s BioForge advances construction as first projects near completion

The Pitt BioForge facility is far from complete, but its team is already launching projects that could make new medicines more affordable. 

The $250 million biomanufacturing facility at Hazelwood Green may not be fully move-in ready until 2028, according to Kinsey Casey, BioForge’s chief administrative officer. But the facility’s team is already hard at work launching its first projects while still operating out of a temporary lab facility in the Riviera building on Technology Drive.

“We’ve already started and completed one project that had a great outcome,” Casey told Technical.ly about Panther Life Sciences, the facility’s first completed project. “The company we worked with decided to expand their research and manufacturing facilities in Pittsburgh instead of relocating to where they [were] based.”

Working with the New York-based company Panther Life Sciences, the BioForge team developed microneedle patches that deliver skin cancer treatments. Over the course of the 10-month project, the team reduced the development costs of these products by nearly half and created two patentable technologies in the process, Casey said. 

BioForge’s next initiative — a marketplace platform that helps researchers buy mRNA from manufacturers — is set to hit the marketplace next month. The platform is already being tested by groups like Pitt’s Center for Vaccine Research and is set to make a public debut in November.

Purchasing mRNA from a manufacturer is “extremely expensive,” so hopefully this new platform will create an “explosion of innovation and commercialization,” Casey said. “mRNA can create vaccines, which we all heard about during the COVID pandemic, but it also can prove useful for various different treatments and therapies.”

Innovating under constraints

Specialized, life-saving medicines are developed every day, but their price tags put them out of reach for many patients who need them most, according to Ken Gabriel, CEO of Pitt BioForge. 

Since manufacturing complexity can add to the steep bills for specialized medicine, BioForge tests new techniques for biomanufacturing so that the private sector can adopt them, potentially leading to better outcomes for patients, Gabriel said at the University of Pittsburgh’s Global Innovation Summit earlier this week. 

So far, all of BioForge’s projects have been connected to Pitt in some way due to the university’s large research output, Casey said, but that won’t necessarily be the case in the future. 

BioForge welcomes other universities, startups and private companies to pitch new projects. However, the team is currently limited in what it can take on due to its limited space while it waits for the BioForge facility to finish construction. 

Recent federal funding cuts mean Pitt has less money to support spaces dedicated to research projects like BioForge, according to Casey, but despite that, the team isn’t slowing down. 

“We have two more projects already in the pipeline that we’re working through,” Casey said. “Certainly, if there are more projects that come to us that we have the capacity to handle, we will take those on as well.”