Biomedical company plans to manufacture innovative cancer treatment on Bay Farm Island
Senti Bio, a cutting-edge medical technology company with a research facility and offices in South San Francisco, celebrated the opening of its new manufacturing plant on Bay Farm Island on Wednesday morning, June 28. The company’s mission is “to create a new generation of smarter medicines that outmaneuver complex diseases using novel and unprecedented approaches.”
City officials, members of the business community, and Senti Bio employees gathered outside the new Bay Farm manufacturing facility for the opening ceremony. The program was introduced by Ron Moldaver, Senior Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications. Speakers included company officers, employees, the developer, and Alameda’s Mayor.
“Thank you for doing the work that you do,” said Mayor Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft. We hope that as Senti continues to grow as an organization, this facility will support the development of many more potentially life-changing products. And I’m confident that it will.”
Senti Bio’s field is synthetic biology, which, according to Wikipedia, “applies engineering principles to develop new biological parts, devices, and systems or to redesign existing systems found in nature.”
The company’s Chief Medical Officer, Kanya Rajangam, M.D., Ph.D, described the innovative product the facility was designed to manufacture. “Our first product is for patients with acute myeloid leukemia, a type of blood cancer, a terrible, terrible, devastating disease,” Rajangam said. “The ones who we hope to enroll in our trial, their median survival is about three to five months—less time than it took for us to think of this facility, build it, and have it be operational. That is who we are striving towards. We are working so hard for our IND (Investigational New Drug application) later this year. That’s when we get approval from the FDA to put it in patients.”
That innovative product is called Senti-202, which Senti calls “a next-generation cell therapy engineered with Logic Gated gene circuits.”
Timothy Lu, M.D., Ph.D. was excited and optimistic about the new Bay Farm facility. “This [building] is to me really a symbol of what Senti has been working on. I think it’s also a call for what’s ahead of us. We know we have a tremendous journey ahead of us over the next few months as we start fully utilizing what we’ve built out here to try to advance those programs.”
Senti Bio is the latest innovative biotechnology company to locate a facility on Bay Farm Island, joining Penumbra, Exelixis, Abbott, and many others. The 76,000-square-foot facility is located at 1430 Harbor Bay Parkway. After the speakers gathered to cut the ribbon, lunch was served to attendees inside the new facility.
Note: an earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Robert Marshall of Dome Construction in the photo caption. We apologize for the error.
Adam Gillitt is the Publisher of the Alameda Post. Reach him at [email protected]. His writing is collected at AlamedaPost.com/Adam-Gillitt.
