FDB boosts contract drug production five-fold

FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies (FDB) is making a play for commercial-scale contract drug production through the construction of a new a large-scale microbial biologics facility at Merck’s Brinny manufacturing site in Ireland. The new facility will increase FDB’s production capacity five-fold.

The new 20,000 l microbial fermentation plant will cost US$60m and is expected to begin operations in 2018 – adding to FDB’s existing 5,000 l contract production facility in Billingham, UK. One third of the world’s pharmaceuticals are currently made using microbes – producing treatments for diseases including cancer. However, there are few contract manufacturers that have the capacity to produce drugs at commercial scale, FDB CEO Steve Bagshaw told The Chemical Engineer.

“Only two other places in the world are offering this scale for contract so it’s filling a gap in the market,” he says. “It really enables us to stay as a partner to some of the people we’ve worked with from pre-clinical all the way through to phase 3 development. As they go commercial and the demands increase, we are able to supply them with drugs from this facility.”

Merck brings to the partnership more than 30 years’ experience of large-scale production at the Brinny site in County Cork. The biopharmaceutical firm benefits from securing a wider range of production activity at its site.

“The crux of it is they [Merck] were looking for long-term work other than from their own [product] pipeline,” Bagshaw said. “They wanted a baseline of microbial work and we were able to offer them that through the portfolio of clients and potential clients we could bring to them.”

“They have over 30 years of manufacturing at this scale and we felt that us plus them hit the sweetspot in the market place,” he added.

The new facility is the first move in a longer-term collaboration. Bagshaw was tight-lipped over what future developments might entail, saying that the firms are “concentrating on getting this part of the collaboration right”.