JHL Biotech is ready to start producing biologics at its new plant in Wuhan, a project that took 18 months from beginning to end to complete.
The company’s plan is to manufacture biosimilars and monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) for late–stage clinical trials and commercial supply for the Chinese market. The facility, which is designed to meet FDA and EMA standards, will also provide process development and manufacturing services, the company said today.
The Chinese biosimilars market is expected to about $350 million by 2019 from $44 million in 2009, JHL said it wanted to tap that with with the new facility.
“It was important to us to establish our scale-up manufacturing capacity in Asia with a manufacturing facility in China capable of producing biologics to a world-class standard,” Racho Jordanov, co-founder and CEO JHL Biotech, said in a statement.
The prefab plant is the product of GE's attempt to bring mass-production techniques, and lower costs, to something that has traditionally been a custom-designed and very expensive process. The conglomerate shipped the plant to the Wuhan site in 62 shipping containers, where it was assembled in 11 days. It has a 2,000-liter capacity, using single-use bioprocessing technology and mimics another facility that GE produced for JHL in Taiwan. The two companies have declined to say how much JHL paid for the facility.
Other companies, including Pfizer, have been working on small modular facilities which can be built quickly and cheaply and then used to manufacture specific meds that fill a local need.
- here’s the release
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