Manufacturing

We manufacture BioThrax® (Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed) at our facilities in Lansing, Michigan using well-established vaccine manufacturing procedures. In Lansing, we own a multi-building campus on approximately 12.5 acres, which includes facilities for bulk manufacturing of BioThrax® (Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed), including fermentation, filtration and formulation, as well as for raw material storage and in-process and final product warehousing. In February 2006, we began construction of a new 50,000 square foot manufacturing facility on our Lansing campus as a large-scale commercial manufacturing plant. Subject to regulatory approval, we expect that the new manufacturing facility will serve as our primary BioThrax® (Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed) manufacturing facility. We also recently commissioned a new pilot plant on our Lansing campus that we are using for process development.

In addition to the Lansing campus, we own two buildings of approximately 145,000 square feet each on a 15-acre site in Frederick, Maryland. We are in the preliminary phase of establishing plans to build out this site, and those plans contemplate that the site would to provide laboratory space, product development and pilot plant production capabilities, full-scale commercial manufacturing operations, warehouse and storage facilities, fill and finish operations and administrative office space.

We believe that manufacturing our products and product candidates independently will provide us cost savings and greater control over the manufacturing and regulatory approval and oversight process, accelerate product development timelines and allow us to expand our base of manufacturing know-how that we can then apply to the development and manufacture of future product candidates. However, we currently rely on contract manufacturers and other third parties to manufacture the supplies of our immunobiotic product candidates that we require for preclinical and clinical development, and we use a third-party filling contractor to fill vials of our licensed product BioThrax® (Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed) . We expect that we may continue to use third parties for production of preclinical, clinical, and commercial supplies of some of our product candidates and possibly for filling operations.