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Cell and gene therapies have already cured thousands of patients of previously incurable diseases – but only a handful of CDMOs in the world can manufacture them at commercial scale.
That bottleneck has become one of the biggest constraints on the next decade of cell and gene therapy growth, with hundreds of late-stage programs chasing a manufacturing footprint that has not expanded fast enough to match them.
AGC Biologics is one of the small group of contract manufacturers running global commercial-scale CGT operations, with a network spanning Milan, Italy; Longmont, Colorado (acquired from Novartis Gene Therapies in 2021); and Yokohama, Japan, where a $350 million, 215,000-square-foot site began cell therapy operations in 2025 ahead of a full mammalian GMP ramp-up in 2027. Alberto Santagostino took over as CEO and President in November 2024 after six years leading Lonza's cell and gene technology division, where his business unit grew four-fold and helped bring four new CGT therapies to commercial supply. Under his leadership, AGC Biologics launched a dedicated Cell and Gene Technologies Division in April 2025 to drive the build-out.
At Meeting on the Med 2026, reporting for Onyx, Federico Citterich sat down with Alberto Santagostino to find out more.
A special thanks to our Onyx Live sponsors:
Cellares – delivering cell therapy manufacturing excellence at scale across a global network of IDMO smart factories https://www.cellares.com/
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