Response Biomedical Corporation will relocate to its new global headquarters in Vancouver, B.C. on March 31, 2008. The 46,000-sf specialized use facility was specifically designed and constructed for development, GMP manufacturing, and distribution of point-of-care (POC) medical diagnostic test kits. The new facility should allow manufacturing scale-up from approximately 500,000 tests currently manufactured per year to four million tests per year by mid-2008, based on the demands of industry partners including 3M and Shinogi & Co. of Japan. Response Biomedical hopes to escalate test-manufacturing capacity to over 15 million tests per year. The new facility features multiple specialized laboratories with environmental controls and monitoring systems required for product development, manufacturing and distribution in compliance with requirements established by global organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and individual regulatory authorities such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health Canada, and the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in Japan. Response Biomedical announced in May 2007 that it had entered into a long-term agreement with Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. to lease the single-tenant facility. Initial capital modifications to the facility were financed by Alexandria and managed by Response Biomedical.
