PathoQuest has received support from the Île-de-France region as part of the PM'up Relance Industrie program to accelerate the industrialisation of the company’s service for quality control testing of biologics and to help sustain its growth in France and internationally.
The regional grant awarded under the PM'up Relance Industrie program will enable the company to expand, upgrade, and automate its biologic testing activities with a significant investment in laboratory and information technology (IT) equipment. It will also allow PathoQuest to recruit highly qualified individuals at its Paris site with a planned doubling of the company’s workforce by 2023.
PathoQuest currently provides quality control biologic testing solutions to more than 50 biopharmaceutical and biotechnology companies worldwide. In 2020, the company obtained Pharmaceutical Establishment status from the French ANSM , expanding access for the company’s offerings to include GMP-grade testing of biologics for clinical trials and commercial batch release of products.
“Our next-generation sequencing (NGS) approach to quality control testing enables the assessment of the characteristics of the cell lines used for drug bioproduction and the detection of adventitious viruses in batches of bioproduced drugs. Our testing, which are applicable to vaccines, cell and gene therapies, as well as therapeutic antibodies, are faster and more reliable than standard testing methods such as animal testing. They are increasingly being sought after by the biopharmaceutical industry in order to accelerate development timelines for biologics, notably vaccines, without compromising safety and efficacy”, said Laurent Lafferrere, PathoQuest’s COO.
“Support from the Ile-de-France region provides very useful development perspectives for bioproduction and its associated ecosystem, which are acknowledged as a key area for national health sovereignty. Additionally, international regulations are evolving with an aim to replace traditional testing with more rapid and sensitive methods such as NGS. This rapidly expanding global market supports the growth projections for our business forecasts and the need to scale up our testing facility and capabilities in Paris”, said Jean-François Brepson, PathoQuest’s CEO.