After teasing a plasma-based manufacturing expansion in the U.S. late last year, CSL is putting in the work and firming up details behind the $1.5 billion project.
Monday, the Australian biopharma broke ground on an expansion at its Kankakee, Illinois, facility, a move set to substantially bolster CSL’s production capacity for plasma-derived therapy.
The expansion, tipped to come online by 2031, will create at least 300 new direct jobs at the facility, adding to the site’s current workforce of more than 1,200, CSL said in a March 9 press release.
Describing the project as a “cornerstone of the company’s global manufacturing growth strategy,” CSL noted that the souped-up facility will incorporate its Horizon 2 production process, which it described as a “yield enhancing technology” that can produce greater quantities of immunoglobulin from “the same base amount of plasma.”
“This site expansion marks an important step forward in increasing efficiency by incorporating new, innovative manufacturing processes and technology into how we produce the plasma-based medicines needed by so many people,” Mary Oates, CSL’s chief operating officer, said in a statement.
She added that the project “will increase protein yield from each gram of plasma collected, strengthening Kankakee's role as a vital site in our global network.”
CSL’s business is split into discrete units overseeing specific classes of products, and its CSL Behring division covers plasma-derived therapies specifically. Those medicines, which help tackle conditions like hemophilia, primary immunodeficiency and hereditary angioedema—and which are also used as emergency treatments in the case of severe injury or certain emergency conditions like postpartum hemorrhage—account for well over half of CSL’s overall revenue.
CSL is likely motivated to invest in the plasma unit now given more recent struggles faced by its vaccine division, CSL Seqirus.
As of last summer, the company had been planning to separate CSL Seqirus as part of a cost-savings initiative, but CSL pushed pause on those plans in October, citing a volatile influenza vaccine market in the U.S. that would have likely stopped the de-merger from reaching its full value potential.
Subsequently, CSL in November pledged to spend about $1.5 billion to bolster plasma-based medicine manufacturing in America. The move was one of many telegraphed by the pharmaceutical industry last year, with multiple companies pledging tens of billions of dollars to beef up their U.S. infrastructure as a countermeasure to the Trump administration’s import tariff threats.
In its announcement this week, CSL clarified that its U.S. capacity expansion efforts were informed both by business needs and “in keeping with the U.S. Administration’s policy of encouraging companies to grow their American manufacturing footprint.”
While CSL is investing in the Kankakee site now, it hasn’t been immune to downsizing in recent years.
In April 2024, CSL revealed that it was letting go of 65 employees as it shut down one of its filling departments at the Illinois site, which is about an hour's drive south from Chicago. At the time, a CSL spokesperson explained site leadership had communicated the closure to staff several years prior and described the move as part of a “commitment to regulatory authorities,” including the FDA.
Elsewhere on the manufacturing front, CSL in December debuted a new $1 billion cell-based influenza vaccine and antivenom facility in Melbourne, Australia.
The new facility is replacing a previous egg-based vaccine manufacturing site and will help supply shots to Australia as well as Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, CSL said late last year.