Dive Brief:
- China's Wuxi Biologics is adding to its manufacturing capabilities, installing 4,000 L custom single run disposable bioreactors from ABEC in its new commercial manufacturing facility in Wuxi city, Jiangsu, China.
- The company says it’s the largest single-use bioreactor size available in the industry, and will result in higher productivity and lower cost of goods for cell culture-based drugs.
- Wuxi said the single-use bioreactors will offer the same performance as stainless steel systems of that size and allow the manufacturer to use multiple bioreactors to scale up to as much as 24,000 L.
Dive Insight:
The company has been building out the site in Wuxi city since April 2015, when it first committed to investing $150 million there. Since, Wuxi has added 30,000 L of bioreactor capacity, which was spread across two 1,000 L bioreactors for perfusion processes and 14-2,000 L bioreactors for batch cell cultures at the 500,000 square-foot facility.
The CDMO has locations in Shanghai and Suzhou, China.
"In addition to the flexibility and time to market benefits of single-use manufacturing, we can now offer our clients true economies of scale and address biologics supply needs from kilograms to tons," said Chris Chen, CEO of Wuxi Biologics, in a statement.
The contract manufacturer boasts work with more than half of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies. Earlier this month, it inked a deal with China's Adagene Inc. to support the supply of biologics to clinical sites in both the U.S. and China.
The Chinese pharmaceutical market has been garnering more attention of late and attracting investment from more international players.
Part of the interest stems from steps taken to loosen regulations within China. The country traditionally was unwelcoming to foreign companies and had high hurdles for entry. Those restrictions have come down somewhat and have sparked a renewed focus on developing pharmaceuticals in the country.