Calls for drugs produced in the U.S. have led to a cottage industry of contract manufacturers hoping to market themselves as "American made." Now, a new CDMO specializing in sterile injectables is launching in Indiana, and it's got $60 million to get the business off the ground.
Incog BioPharma Services will drop that amount to build its first manufacturing facility and headquarters in Fishers, Indiana, as it prepares to enter the clinical and commercial injectable pharmaceuticals market, the company said last week.
Incog's 60,000-square-foot facility is set to break ground in December and will go online in the first half of 2022, the CDMO said. The site will eventually employ 150 workers by the end of 2022 with 65 of those joining prior to launch, according to a release.
The site will come with a $2.5 million conditional tax credit from the Indiana Economic Development Corporation and up to $200,000 from the Industrial Development Grant Fund to support infrastructure improvements, Incog said.
Indiana has become a U.S. hub for life sciences with 2,100 companies operating in the state, Incog said. It is the second-largest state exporter of life sciences products at $10.5 billion per year, the company noted.
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The U.S. contract manufacturing market for injectables has received newfound interest in recent months as the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified calls for an "onshore" pharmaceutical supply chain.
In June, Michigan-based Grand River Aseptic Manufacturing (GRAM) completed a $60 million expansion to install a "large-scale" fill-finish injectables facility that it will market primarily to U.S drugmakers, the company said at the time.
The new 60,000-square-foot facility in downtown Grand Rapids will triple GRAM's manufacturing footprint to more than 100,000 square feet of production space and help level up the company's sterile injectables offerings, according to a release. The newest fill-finish plant is GRAM's third, the company said, and its fifth manufacturing facility overall.
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In March, Copenhagen-based Xellia said it would scale up its approved pipeline of anti-infectives and produce injectable drugs on contract at its plant in the Cleveland suburb of Bedford.
Xellia had more than 200 employees at the plant after investing more than $200 million to revamp it, a spokesman said at the time.
The company originally bought the plant in 2015, two years after Boehringer Ingelheim closed it and laid off 1,100 workers because upgrades required under a federal consent decree were deemed too costly. The consent decree followed sterility lapses that led to dozens of drug recalls, and the closure triggered a host of drug shortages.