Dive Brief:
- Japan's Fujifilm will spend almost $1 billion to build out a biologic drug manufacturing plant in Hillerød, Denmark, which it purchased from Biogen last year.
- The investment of 100 billion yen, or $928 million, will double the drug substance production capacity at the site, said Fujifilm, which owns a contract development and manufacturing organization unit.
- The project, which will take until 2023 to complete, will allow Fujifilm to make drug substance, fill vials, label and package medicines all at one facility, the Japanese company said in a June 9 statement.
Dive Insight:
Fujifilm said the mammoth investment will help vault the company among the top ranks of drug contract manufacturers.
The company, like other CDMOs, is benefiting from recent efforts by major drugmakers to slim down operations. Fujifilm picked up the site in Denmark from Biogen for about $890 million and became a supplier for the biopharma as part of the deal.
Merck, Sanofi and Teva are among the other pharmaceutical companies that have offloaded
manufacturing facilities in recent years.
Together with the original purchase, the new Fujifilm project represents one of the drug industry's biggest investments in a production site, rivaling the $2 billion spent by Novo Nordisk on an active pharmaceutical ingredient production facility in North Carolina.
Fujifilm said its purchase of the Denmark site has spurred new orders and the acquisition of clients. It reached an agreement with a group that includes the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to reserve manufacturing capacity in the hopes that the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator will find a therapy to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
The company plans to add another six mammalian cell bioreactors at its Denmark site by the fall of 2023. It's also adding a fill/finish line by the summer of 2023 capable of producing about 35 million units a year, and a new packaging line for multiple types of auto-injectors and automatic labeling by spring 2022.
Fujfilm projects nearly $1 billion in sales from its biologics CDMO business by March 2022, and more than $2 billion by March 2026.