Fujifilm Diosynth Investing $1.6 Billion in Denmark and Texas Plants

Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland)--Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies is set to spend up to $1.6 billion to expand its biopharma contract development and manufacturing company (CDMO) operations in Denmark and Texas.

The investment by the subsidiary of Fujifilm Corporation (Tokyo, Japan) will see the creation of 450 jobs, and the Denmark site expansion at Hillerod will include new sustainability features as part of the company's aim to achieve net zero CO2 emissions by the end of 2040. At Hillerod, where most of the money will be invested, the company will add capacity and support large-scale cGMP (Current Good Manufacturing Practice)-fed batch production by adding eight 20,000-liter (L) bioreactors and two downstream processing streams. The additional production capacity will make the Hillerod facility the largest end-to-end CDMO in Europe, Fujifilm claimed, offering a total of 20 x 20,000 L bioreactors for drug substance production, as well as a range of drug product and finished goods services.

Hillerod will boast a number of sustainability measures to support Fujifilm's new "Green Value Climate Strategy," including being powered by carbon-free energy. It will also see the installation of an electric boiler rather than a conventional boiler powered by natural gas, which will remove the "operational dependency of the site on fossil fuels." Projects aimed at reducing water consumption will also be put in place. In Texas, the company will expand cell culture manufacturing solutions at its College Station site. Last year, the company announced a US$300 million investment at College Station for a new 138,000-square-foot building, equipped with cell culture manufacturing suites and laboratories to increase single-use production and research and development of gene therapies.

"Fujifilm is further expanding its bio CDMO business with the growth strategy of both capital investment and technological innovation to fulfill rapidly growing demand for high volume production of biopharmaceuticals," said Teiichi Goto, president and chief executive officer of Fujifilm Corporation. "With this major investment in the large-scale production facility and the deployment of the next generation production technology, we will be the best partner for customers as the premier bio CDMO."

This new investment in Denmark and Texas comes a year after the company committed to spending US$480 million to expand its U.K. CDMO operation at Billingham. The campus will include two new state-of-the-art facilities: a viral gene therapy GMP facility and a GMP mammalian cell culture facility. Industrial Info is tracking four associated projects at the site.

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