Center for Breakthrough Medicines
Accelerating the Speed-to-Market of Advanced Therapies

Founded in 2020, Center for Breakthrough Medicines (CBM) is a contract development and manufacturing company (CDMO) offering end-to-end manufacturing solutions focused on reducing the time, complexity, and cost of commercializing life-saving therapies. Located within The Discovery Labs’ campus in King of Prussia, CBM supports the development and manufacturing of therapies—primarily cell and gene therapies—from the pre-clinical stage through clinical and commercialization within a single facility.

“CBM is a robust and equivalent alternative to the internal build of manufacturing capacity. We enable our clients to focus on the science and clinical development and leave the development of processes, for manufacturing and testing to us,” says Joerg Ahlgrimm, President and CEO, CBM. The company helps small to midsized biotech and large pharma companies continually improve their yield, ensure capacity to provide a steady supply of their life changing therapies, and extend their cash runway to accelerate the development of advanced therapies with well-characterized, compliant, and scalable manufacturing and development processes.

Taking a client-driven approach, CBM brings high-quality and reliability into analytical development, plasmid production, viral vector manufacturing, cell therapy bioprocessing, GMP testing, and cell banking services to support the full product life cycle of an advanced therapy. Their end-to-end analytics and testing capabilities help mitigate the wait time, and increase the accuracy of the testing methods through advanced analytical techniques, to reduce risk and accelerate the development of these therapies to clinic.

CBM also distinguishes themselves from other CDMO’s by offering their clients a transparent and flexible working relationships, like their Partner-in-Plant model as part of their end to end service. This model offers clients a dedicated area with private meeting rooms on site and they welcome their partners with proper training to be onsite in their suite during production.

The flexibility and agility of CBM’s services have been key factors for their successful engagements with clients. One of their recent publicly announced partnerships is with the clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, Achilles Therapeutics to accelerate the development of their flagship precision T-cell therapies.

With everything they do, CBM aligns with their mission to save lives by accelerating the development and manufacturing of Advanced Therapies. The company strives to be at the forefront of helping healthcare systems bring down the cost of potential therapies. To that end, CBM is working in tandem with their clients and building strong technology platforms to significantly increase the yield, purity, and quality of what they manufacture.

CBM is a robust and equivalent alternative to the internal build of manufacturing capacity. We enable our clients to focus on the science and clinical development and leave the development of processes, for manufacturing and testing to us

In a span of two years, CBM has dramatically grown into a leader in the development of advanced therapies, housing a team of about 350 people. To achieve this feat, the company has paid keen attention to assembling professionals with years of experience in innovator companies and CDMOs. They also foster an inclusive, nurturing culture that encourages everyone in the team to contribute.

Going forward, CBM will be building its capabilities around process maturity and physical capacity. The company is also gearing up to release their GMP suites online to complement their online process development and testing capabilities. The company is also building strong foundational systems and processes and investing significantly into material and quality management systems, manufacturing execution systems, and laboratory information management systems.

The future will see CBM expanding to other modalities such as induced pluripotent stem cells, and mRNA, for covering a wide range of advanced therapies. To support these operations, they are planning to build around 550,000 to 600,000 sqft worth of infrastructural space. “We are increasing our offering of available technology platform to help clients rapidly move through the development process into GMP and reduce the time from molecule to Investigational New Drug (IND),” concludes Ahlgrimm.