Kite announces Urbana facility expansion, 100 new jobs

An expansion to Kite’s Urbana cell therapy facility is expected to add 100 new jobs, the Gilead-owned biopharmaceutical company announced Tuesday morning. The addition is a 70,000-square-foot warehouse that will provide storage space for raw materials used in the company’s existing facility, according to a company press release. Construction on the warehouse, which will be adjacent to the existing facility, will begin later this year. Kite’s Urbana facility produces chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapies, also called “CAR T-cell therapy,” a form of cancer treatment that trains a patient’s immune cells to find and kill off cancer cells. The new warehouse will centralize the materials required for this manufacturing process and streamline operations, Chris McDonald, Kite’s global head of technical operations, said in the press release.