Come next year, more than 100 new staffers are expected clock in alongside robots to make highly sought-after hospital drugs at Assure Infusions’ forthcoming manufacturing plant in Florida.
Assure broke cover earlier this year to produce IV fluids in high demand in the U.S. healthcare system. Now, the fledging drugmaker has drafted designs on a 60,000-square-foot facility in Bartow, Florida, where it plans to rev up operations in 2023. Assure says the facility will be fully automated with advanced robotics.
Assure hopes the plant, once complete, will help cement its position as an innovator on the pharma manufacturing scene. Alongside the company’s machine workforce, Assure plans to hire more than 100 human staffers at the plant, the company said.
Assure is one of many companies joining the push to onshore U.S. drug manufacturing. Over the years, much of the nation’s drug production has been outsourced to countries such as India and China. The perils of those fractured supply chains became especially apparent in recent years against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Apart from robotics, several companies are attempting to resurrect domestic drug production with continuous manufacturing—an approach where processing steps play out in an unbroken stream, unlike the stop-and-start batch process the pharma industry has leaned on for decades.
Continuus Pharmaceuticals, for instance, received a U.S. contract for $69.3 million in 2021 to help onshore the U.S. drug supply chain using a continuous approach. In January, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) spinout said it would spend $125 million on a new facility in Woburn, MA, where it plans to churn out dry active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) and finished drug products in sterile injectable and tablet forms.
Nevertheless, some industry watchers, such as consulting firm EY’s life sciences partner Olaf Zweig, have argued that “localization alone will not increase [supply chain] resilience.” EY, for its part, thinks companies could best bolster their supply chains by transitioning from a “fully globalized” model to a “hybrid” one that balances worldwide, regional and local sites.