Amid a multi-year, multibillion-dollar spending spree to scale its global manufacturing capacity, Novo Nordisk is laying down fresh foundations at its old stomping grounds in Denmark to bolster a critical component of production: quality control.
Novo will invest 2.9 billion Danish kroner (roughly $409 million) to construct a new, 53,000-square-meter (570,487-square-foot) quality control laboratory in Hillerød, Denmark, where the company also operates a sprawling plant focused on cranking out injection pens for chronic diseases such as diabetes and obesity.
Novo said Monday that it’s already kicked off construction on the lab and plans to complete the project in 2027. The $409 million outlay represents the company’s largest investment in advanced quality control to date, the company noted in a release.
Once completed, the new facility will act as a central hub for quality control operations in Denmark and consolidate existing locations at a single site, Novo explained. The quality assurance hub is being designed to meet both “known demand” as well as future capacity expansions.
“As we expand our manufacturing capacity and anticipate new products to meet the growing global demand, this new quality control facility will play an important role in ensuring the quality of our products and position us to meet the evolving requirements of patients and regulators,” Erik Lorin Rasmussen, Novo’s SVP of product supply for aseptic manufacturing, said in a statement.
Novo’s investment follows a string of high-profile cash infusions designed to bolster manufacturing capacity in recent years. Chiefly, Novo has busied itself beefing up in areas like fill-and-finish to meet the rampant demand for its diabetes and obesity GLP-1 agonists, Ozempic and Wegovy.
At Hillerød specifically, Novo last June unveiled a 15.9 billion kroner ($2.3 billion) investment to install a new, 700,000-square-foot multi-product facility, which is slated to start producing active pharmaceutical ingredients by 2029. At the time, Novo said it had embarked on the project to “develop its future clinical late-phase product portfolio.”
More recently, the Danish drugmaker in June said it would lay out $4.1 billion to construct a second fill-finish plant at its campus in Clayton, North Carolina. The facility will chip in on production Ozempic and Wegovy and represents a portion of Novo’s total planned manufacturing investment of $6.8 billion in 2024.
Meanwhile, just this week, vaccine maker Novavax said it is selling a recombinant protein plant in the Czech Republic to Novo Nordisk for $200 million. Novo and Novavax expect that transaction to wrap up by the year's end, at which point Novo will take control of the plant and some 300 employees who currently work there. The facility will not be used to make Ozempic and Wegovy, a spokesperson told Fierce Pharma Wednesday.
Elsewhere, Novo is in line to purchase three Catalent fill-finish sites for $11 billion from its sister company Novo Holdings. Novo Holdings, which operates alongside Novo Nordisk under the banner of the Novo Nordisk Foundation, is aiming to purchase CDMO Catalent for $16.5 billion in a deal that’s expected to close in the next few weeks.