WuXi Biologics Starts Up Large-Scale, Single-Use Biomanufacturing Facility

WuXi Biologics, a China-based open-access biologics technology platform company, announced on Dec. 6, 2017 that it has started up its new 30,000-L cGMP biologics manufacturing facility in Wuxi, China, and that the facility is now fully operational. The company announced a $150-million investment to build the facility in April 2015.

The first phase of construction was completed in September 2016 that included two 1,000-L disposable bioreactors for perfusion processes. According to the company, this makes the facility the largest perfusion biologics manufacturing facility using disposable bioreactors in Asia. Following the completion of the first phase of construction, the company began a cGMP campaign 15 months later, resulting in the facility being equipped with additional fourteen 2,000-L disposable bioreactors for fed-batch cell culture.

The new 500,000-ft² facility quintuples the company’s existing manufacturing capability and will support the biologics commercial manufacturing pipeline coming from the company’s global partners. The newly added capacity will also address the needs of Chinese companies in light of the fact that biologics contract manufacturing for Chinese companies is currently being piloted by China Food and Drug Administration.

“We are very pleased that it only took us a little more than two years from our own innovative concept of using single-use bioreactors for commercial manufacturing facilities to actual completion of a global standard state-of-the-art facility in Wuxi city. This new facility design with a lower capital expenditure and shorter facility timeline compared to that of traditional biologics commercial manufacturing facilities, represents a novel design for facility-of-the-future, which has been emulated by several companies globally,” said Dr. Chris Chen, CEO of WuXi Biologics, in a company press release. “The new site in Wuxi delivers to our customers additional capacity, greater flexibility, and higher efficiency.”

Source: WuXi Biologics