WuXi plans commercial biomanufacturing plant on back of biologics demand
Net revenues were up 18% on the third quarter last year to $174m (€140m), WuXi reported this week, with manufacturing services attributing $48m to this total – up 23% on Q3 2013. While much of this was small molecule manufacture, biomanufacturing’s total revenue contribution grew from 4.8% to 8.7%.
“We have now created one of the largest biologics development operations among all global contracts research and development organisations,” CEO Ge Li said in a conference call yesterday. “We now have a solid 500 member team of development operations in biologics.”
Furthermore, Li told investors he expected demand for biologics to continue to grow, and WuXi was looking to up its capabilities to address this trend.
“A key source of growth in biologics over the next several years will be biomanufacturing. We are making plans to build biological commercial manufacturing facilities to meet the strong demand that we are seeing. In short, biologics will be one of our key growth drivers for the next several years.”
The contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) is currently building a large scale research and commercial small-molecule manufacturing facility in Changzhou City at a cost of more than $100m, but Li said yesterday the commercial biomanufacturing plant would be built in 2015 adjacent to its pilot clinical manufacturing facility in WuXi City.
Already this year WuXI began construction on a fully single-use cell therapy facility in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - on track to be completed around mid-2015 – which will include clinical and commercial manufacturing capabilities for allogeneic and autologous cell-based therapeutics.
