Fujifilm isn’t slowing down on its expansion roll. Just a few months after it bought Shanandoah Biotechnology for an undisclosed sum, the Japanese conglomerate has unveiled a $1.6 billion investment to expand the cell culture manufacturing services of Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, a CDMO subsidiary.
The investment will benefit its sites in Hillerød, Denmark, and Texas, and create approximately 450 jobs.
In Denmark, Fujifilm Diosynth will expand its capacity to support large-scale batch production through the addition of eight 20,000-liter bioreactors and two downstream processing streams, making it largest end-to-end CDMO in Europe. Once the expansion is complete, the site will feature twenty 20,000-liter bioreactions for drug substance production, plus drug product and finished good services.
The Denmark facility’s sustainable features, such as an electric boiler rather than one powered by natural gas, will support Fujifilm’s new Green Value Climate Strategy and remove its dependency on fossil fuels. Fujifilm Diosynth is also investing in programs that aim to reduce water consumption.
The expansion will help Fujifilm fulfill “rapidly growing demand for high volume production” of biopharmaceuticals, Teiichi Goto, president and CEO of Fujifilm, said in a statement. The major investment will enable the company to be “the best partner for customers as the premier bio CDMO,” Goto added.
The move comes amid something of an expansion spree for the company. In January, the Fujifilm acquired a cell therapy plant from Atara Biotherapeutics for $100 million in Thousand Oaks, California, agreeing to a long-term deal to help produce treatments in Atara’s clinical pipeline.
Last January, the company spent $76 million to build on a new 40,000-square-foot facility in Watertown, Massachusetts. The move was part of a push to deliver $1.8 billion in CDMO revenues by 2024.
But the company’s biggest move came just days before the Watertown lease, when it pledged $2 billion for a large cell culture site in the U.S., which will be operational by the spring of 2025.
