Fujifilm Biotechnologies (hereafter Fujifilm), a Japanese biopharmaceutical contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMO) corporations, said it has completed an expansion of its antibody drug manufacturing facility in the United Kingdom and will begin full operations.
With Switzerland's Lonza and Samsung Biologics leading the CDMO market on the back of large-scale commercial manufacturing facilities, Fujifilm is viewed as expanding its capacity through aggressive investment. Competition in the global CDMO market is expected to intensify.
Fujifilm said on the 11th (local time) that it has completed and officially opened an antibody manufacturing facility expansion project at its Teesside site in northeastern England. It comes about four years after construction began at the end of 2021. The project drew an investment of £400 million (about 793.6 billion won).
According to the company, the new facility is about 10,200 square meters and is specialized for small- and mid-scale antibody drug production. Equipped with single-use bioreactors of 2,000 liters and 5,000 liters, the company said it has secured a total production capacity of 19,000 liters.
Fujifilm stressed that with this expansion it has secured the largest single-use biopharmaceutical CDMO manufacturing facility in the United Kingdom.
The facility will be used for the development and production of treatments for cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and rare diseases, and is slated to go into full operation in the first half of this year. The company said it designed the site to allow additional expansion in line with customer demand.
The project also includes the "Bioprocess Innovation Centre UK." Fujifilm plans to operate it as a global hub responsible for process development and biomanufacturing innovation.
The investment is part of Fujifilm's global manufacturing network strategy, "kojoX." Based on modular, standardized design, kojoX builds production facilities in each region with similar structures to enhance supply chain flexibility and manufacturing efficiency.
Fujifilm is also expanding orders in the United States centered on a large-scale manufacturing hub. The Holly Springs plant in North Carolina is currently operating eight 20,000-liter bioreactors and producing both drug substance (DS) and drug product (DP). Through this, the company has secured production volumes by signing contracts with global pharmaceutical companies such as Regeneron, Johnson & Johnson, and argenx.
Fujifilm plans to add eight more bioreactors of the same 20,000-liter scale by 2028. The new biomanufacturing facility under construction in Toyama, Japan, is also being built under the kojoX design philosophy and is slated to start operations in 2027.
Meanwhile, the global biopharmaceutical CDMO market is currently led by Lonza, Samsung Biologics, U.S. companies Catalent and Thermo Fisher Scientific, and China's WuXi Biologics. Behind No. 1 Lonza, corporations ranked Nos. 2 to 5 are swapping places and engaging in fierce competition.