German CDMO BioSpring is building a new production facility that it hopes will become one of the world's biggest manufacturing sites for DNA- and RNA-based active pharmaceutical ingredients (API).
The 164,000-square-foot facility will be located at the company’s campus in Offenbach, Germany, and will create about 200 new jobs once complete, the company said in a July 3 press release. BioSpring noted that it's also eyeing additional job openings at its Offenbach campus beyond those needed to man the up-and-coming API plant.
The new drug ingredients plant will include a manufacturing and warehouse facility, an office for quality control and production teams and a glass atrium reserved for events, all of which will be interconnected, BioSpring noted in its release. The company will also erect an external solvent tank farm. The entire project is expected to finish by the end of 2027.
While BioSpring didn't disclose the exact cost of the production expansion, the company noted that the investment in the Offenbach API facility "amounts to several hundred million euros.”
“With our investment in Offenbach, we are setting new standards in nucleic acid drug substance manufacturing,” Sylvia Wojczewski, Ph.D., BioSpring’s chief executive and co-founder, said in the release. “In the future, we’ll be able to produce nucleic acids for therapeutic applications on a ton scale."
Founded in 1997, BioSpring specializes in the production and analysis of therapeutic nucleic acids, and oligonucleotides in particular. The Offenbach manufacturing facility will mark BioSpring's third in Europe. The company's website states that a fourth production site is already in the planning stages.
BioSpring is one of many drugmakers looking to capitalize on the rising tide of nucleic acid-based therapeutics.
Last summer, Eli Lilly opened the doors to a $700 million RNA and DNA research center in the Boston Seaport. At the time, Lilly's CEO, Dave Ricks, positioned the investment as a means to "push the boundaries of delivery technology to unlock difficult to treat targets in key strategic areas for us like neurodegeneration, diabetes and obesity.”
More recently, CMDO WuXi Biologics in June broke ground on a new 1.2 million-square-foot microbial production plant in Chengdu, China, that will accommodate a variety of modalities, including plasmid DNA.