Amid a broader push to beef up cell and gene therapy manufacturing capacity in Europe, Novartis has opened the doors to a €40 million ($41.2 million) viral vector facility in Mengeš, Slovenia.
The new site brings the drugmaker’s total investment in the country so far to €3.5 billion ($3.6 billion), Novartis said in an emailed press release.
Construction on the fully automated facility, dubbed VIFA One, began in 2023. The company is hailing the plant as "the first step by Novartis in viral vector production in Europe."
The facility will be used to produce viral vectors for new cell and gene therapies for cancer and other diseases, Novartis said. The plant itself features a fully automated production environment that uses robotics to run through all stages of production at a single site.
Novartis operates in Slovenia through two companies, Novartis LLC and Novartis Pharma Services, which are based out of Ljubljana and Mengeš, respectively.
As it stands, Novartis says it has about €500 million ($516 million) in investments currently underway at the Ljubljana and Mengeš sites.
“Our location in Mengeš has a long tradition of developing and producing of biologics,” Petra Štefanič Anderluh, a Novartis general manager, said in a statement. “Mengeš represents the largest center for modern innovative biotechnology in Slovenia.”
Slovenia has long been a big investment target for Novartis, as well as its former generics and biosimilars arm Sandoz, which threw down $400 million on a new biologics plant in the country in 2023 while it was in the process of being spun out.
And Novartis itself said in 2022 that it would spend $300 million—despite being in a cost-cutting mode at the time—to grow its development and manufacturing operations as it moved into biologics. That pledge included $110 million to grow its Slovenian manufacturing presence in Mengeš.