Fujifilm continues CDMO expansion, breaking ground on $435M UK site
Fujifilm’s CDMO arm, Fujifilm Diosynth, has been on a roll this month as the company has recently broken ground on a major project in Europe and it appears to be keeping up the momentum.
Fujifilm Diosynth announced that it has kicked off an expansion project for its microbial manufacturing facility at its campus in the town of Billingham, UK, in the northeast of England.
The 20,000 square-foot, £400 million ($435 million) expansion will add clean rooms, purification suites and a packing area along with more space for the manufacturing itself.
According to Fujifilm Diosynth, the project is slated to be completed at the end of next year or the beginning of 2024 and will boost the manufacturing capacity by 70%. Once completed, it will also look to create around 350 jobs.
When the expansion was announced last year, the site was expected to feature four 2,000L bioreactors and two 500L single-use bioreactors to make monoclonal and novel antibody treatments in a cell culture facility.
Paul Found“Through innovation and the utilization of high-throughput technologies, we continually strive to increase our renowned microbial process development services to complement our extensive manufacturing experience,” Paul Found, the COO of the UK site, said in a statement.
This comes as Fujifilm Diosynth kicked off the construction for a $1.6 billion expansion project at the company’s site in Denmark to increase cell culture production as well as to boost capabilities at a facility in Texas. The company is also looking to make an investment of $850 million total across its sites in the US and the UK.
Fujifilm’s Billingham facility has also been a key player in Covid-19 vaccine production, serving as Novavax’s contract partner in producing the antigen component for its vaccine.
