As part of Fujifilm’s $90 million plans to grow its CDMO business, the Japanese company said it will expand its production facility in North Carolina to support increased customer needs.
The company announced last week that its Fujifilm Cellular Dynamics subsidiary would spend $21 million to build a new facility in Madison, Wisconsin, to ramp up induced pluripotent stem cell technologies for its pipeline of regenerative drugs and to manufacture iPS cells for others. That project is expected to be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2020.
The company said additional details on further investments at Fujifilm locations will be announced in the coming months.
The investment at the facility in Morrisville, North Carolina, operated by Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies will include the addition of 2,000-liter single-use cell culture manufacturing trains, cell culture purification suites and new microbial recovery suites. The additions are expected to boost cell manufacturing capacity by 25% and microbial capacity by about 50%. The new additions are expected to be on ling by early next year.
“We provide high-quality products and services through leading-edge, proprietary technologies in various fields,” Takatoshi Ishikawa, director, SVP and general manager of Fujifilm’s Bio CDMO division, said in a statement.
Fujifilm joins a host of other companies that are expanding their development of regenerative treatments that use stem cell. Those include Novo Nordisk and Orchard Therapeutics, which also recently announced plans to build new biotech facilities.