The Native Antigen Company (NAC), Oxford, UK, recently relocated into larger facilities equipped with purpose-built laboratories and doubling the company’s manufacturing capacity.

The move aims to increase the speed of new product development within NAC’s core business of infectious disease antigens and antibodies. The new laboratory space also enables NAC to add custom immunoassays to its portfolio, supporting customers’ enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and lateral-flow device requirements.

The new suite of laboratories seeks to satisfy increasing commercial demands and accommodate NAC’s growing research and development (R&D) pipeline. The move also facilitates expansion of the company’s custom services for recombinant protein production, based on its proprietary mammalian cell expression system. The HEK293 expression system at NAC has been used to prepare a wide range of complex recombinant proteins that have been shown to be glycosylated and to demonstrate functional activity.

“I am delighted with the new facilities and the increased capacity that they provide,” says Nick Roesen, chief scientific officer at NAC. “The addition of immunoassay development services will enable our customers to work with us from protein expression through to development of an immunoassay for a specific protein. In providing this new service, we aim to fill the gap between small-scale R&D expression and high-end pharmaceutical scale good manufacturing practice manufacturing.”