The facility will be designed to meet U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines and use scalable modular processes. It will contain 48,5000 sq ft of space for clinical manufacturing and quality control processes. The site is expected to be completed by the end of 2020 and fully operational in 2021.

Marker will manufacture its multiTAA-specific T-cell therapy for its acute myeloid leukemia clinical trial when the facility is operational. Until then, it will continue to manufacture the therapy at the Baylor College of Medicine.

The multiTAA platform is a nongenetically modified cell therapy approach that selectively expands tumor-specific T cells from a patient's blood. In early clinical trials the therapy has been well tolerated and shown to enhance the body's own tumor-destroying capabilities. It is among one of the first therapies to demonstrate epitope spreading -- inducing a patient's own T cells to expand for a potentially lasting antitumor effect.