Teknova expands production capacity to meet demand for viral transport media

High-throughput, automated line at Teknova.

Teknova—a leading manufacturer of cell culture media and supplements, purification buffers, and molecular biology reagents—has expanded the production capacity for its range of viral transport media. This strategy enables the company to not only continue supplying these important products in periods of high demand, but also to offer the best pricing available for products of this type.

With the COVID-19 pandemic ongoing, there is an urgent need for viral transport media, to facilitate disease testing worldwide. In response to this high demand, Teknova has increased its production capacity for a range of transport media, including the innovative room temperature-stable Active Viral Transport Medium (ATM), and its CDC-formulation Viral Transport Medium (VTM), both of which completed FDA notification in 2020.

To increase production capacity, Teknova constructed dedicated new clean rooms, designed from scratch to meet the ISO 13485 and GMP standards required for production of its full range of transport media—saline, VTM and ATM. In addition, the company has invested in advanced, high-throughput automated lines for production of viral transport media, which has streamlined the process significantly. On this, Vice President of Engineering at Teknova, Jose Olague, said: “Automating the manufacturing process enabled us to rapidly scale up production from 300,000 to over 1 million tubes per week, and control contamination risks even more tightly. The larger production volumes also mean we can offer an extremely competitive price on our transport media, ensuring value for customers and greater access to these important products.”

Teknova has an incredibly robust supply chain delivering a highly secure supply, as Olague explains: “At Teknova, we have an extremely flexible chain of raw material supply, with multiple suppliers for each formulation component that aligns perfectly with our automation capabilities and adaptability to accommodate differences in final packaging configurations. Our wealth of QC data accumulated over many years’ experience and expertise in reagent manufacturing also allow us to rapidly switch supplier if necessary—an important advantage to secure continuous supply to customers, given the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.”