Over the past decade, B-MS has divested non-core businesses, reduced its global network and streamlined its manufacturing processes in order to focus on the biologics market, CFO Charles Bancroft said at the Stifel 2016 Health Care Conference this week.
“[In 2007] we had a nutritional business, we had actually in wound care business, we had diagnostics medical imagining business, and we had 30 plants and we had 6500 SKUs,” he told investors (transcript here).
“At that point we decided to become a very focused biopharma company sort of taking the best way to think pharma and the best of let's say biotech.”
Today, biological products make up around 75% of the firm’s pipeline, reflected in its whittled-down network, Bancroft said.
“We went from 27 plants to 11. We cut our SKUs in half. We became much more nimble and focused as where we want to compete,” he said.
“Part of what we are trying in the transformation is making sure that the manufacturing organisation is organised around biologics end-to-end.”
While BMS has invested heavily in its biomanufacturing sites – including continued expansions at its Orencia (abatacept) production site in Devens, Massachusetts and a $900m investment in a 30,000m2 biologics facility in Ireland – the firm also uses contract manufacturing organisations (CMOs)
Among its suppliers is Samsung Biologics which inked a 10-year deal in 2013 to make BMS’s monoclonal antibody Yervoy (ipilimumab) from its facility in Songdo, Korea.
The company also has a deal with Swiss CMO Lonza, which imakes quantities of Orencia and a second undisclosed biologics from its facility in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.