Genentech turns out lights at first commercial biologics plant, laying off 265 staffers

It’s the end of an era as the world’s first commercial biologics plant—once home to a secretive project dubbed “Orange Marmalade”—turns out the lights.

After years of planning, Genentech is winding down operations at its production facility in South San Francisco, the company told Fierce Pharma. The site wrapped up its final production runs several weeks back and is now in the decommissioning phase, which will take some six to 12 months.

In turn, roughly 265 employees are set to lose their jobs, though “that number is dropping a bit every day,” Andi Goddard, Roche’s senior vice president of pharma technical operations and global head of quality and compliance, said in an interview. Back when Genentech first telegraphed the plant closure plan to employees in 2019, the company expected to lay off around 900 people, she explained.

“We don’t want to lose talent that we could retain,” Goddard noted. 

Instead of laying off the entire team, most staffers at the site have transitioned to a new clinical supply center in the same city.

The South San Francisco plant closure has been in the cards since 2007, Goddard explained. “We knew a very long time ago that we’d never be able to manufacture all the volume we needed to manufacture out of this facility,” Goddard said.

As Genentech built out new plants and evolved its technology, the original South San Francisco site was “aging,” she said.

The facility in its original form was built all the way back in the late 1970s and early 80s for the manufacture of protropin—the first product produced and marketed by a biotech company, Goddard said.

When Genentech built the main part of the facility to crank out monoclonal antibodies, meanwhile, “nobody really believed you could manufacture at that scale,” she said.

At the time, the company’s mAb work was part of a “very secret” project complete with its own code name: Orange Marmalade.

Since its inception, the facility, which was also the first plant to manufacture recombinant proteins at scale, has launched 14 molecules, including the drugs Activase and Herceptin.

Goddard’s own saga at the company is closely tied to the plant, as well. After starting her career with Genentech right out of college, she initially worked graveyard hours as the only woman on a shift of all men.

“I grew up in this facility,” she said, noting she worked there for more than 18 years before moving up the ladder at Roche and Genentech. Swiss multinational Roche bought Genentech in 2009 for nearly $47 billion.

Looking ahead, much of Genentech’s manufacturing operations will rely on its new clinical supply center in South San Francisco and a parallel single-use commercial facility in Oceanside, California.

The Oceanside campus, where Genentech unveiled a $450 million manufacturing investment late last month, is a “copy-and-paste” version of the new clinical supply center, which the company expects to sharply abbreviate commercial tech transfer timelines. The move is also expected to cut spending and resource use.

As for some of the new technologies Genentech is rolling out, the company is leveraging continuous manufacturing, as well as cell culture process intensification, among other novel production approaches.

“That allows you to go from a 12,000- or 25,000-liter bioreactor down to a 2,000-liter bioreactor and get the same volume of products,” Goddard explained.

In South San Francisco, Genentech is still figuring out the ultimate fate of its original plant. Portions of the facility are still in use for development labs, according to Goddard.

Regardless, a site sale or lease is out of the question: “It’s in the center of our campus; it’s been the heartbeat of the lower part of our campus for 40 years,” she said.