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AGC expands biopharmaceutical production capabilities in Seattle and Copehagen

| By Mary Bailey

agc

AGC Biologics’ Seattle facility

AGC Inc.(Tokyo; www.agc.com) has announced plans to expand facilities at the U.S. and European sites of its subsidiary AGC Biologics, headquartered in the United States and engaged in the biopharmaceutical CDMO (Contract Development & Manufacturing Organization) business.

A 500-liter mammalian-cell bioreactor will be added to its Seattle facility in the U.S., while a new purification line will be installed at its Copenhagen facility in Europe. The total investment is expected to be around 2 billion yen. Operation is scheduled to begin at the US facility in April 2020, and October at the European facility.

AGC Group has made a commitment to positioning life sciences, which includes its biopharmaceutical CDMO business, as one of its strategic initiatives with the aim of achieving sales in the 100-billion-yen range by 2025. Through this initiative, AGC has already developed manufacturing and sales bases in Europe and the US through the acquisitions of Biomeva (Germany) in 2016 and CMC Biologics (United States and Denmark) in 2017. Since then, the company has been making aggressive investments in equipment and facilities at locations across Japan, Europe, and the US, which has succeeded in steadily expanding contracted work.

A 500 liter single-use (Culture tanks that use a disposable vessel) mammalian cell bioreactor will be added to the company’s Seattle facility in the US. This will serve better, pharmaceuticals companies with biopharmaceuticals at the earlier stages of development and clinical trials. Meanwhile, a new purification line will be installed at the company’s Copenhagen facility in Europe, along with additional analytic labs. This will boost the Copenhagen site’s production efficiency by 1.5 times. These expansions will help meet the growing market, which has been growing at a pace of at least 8% per year.