AstraZeneca announces $1.5b ADC manufacturing facility

A new $1.5 billion antibody drug conjugate (ADC) manufacturing facility in Singapore is set to increase global supply of AstraZeneca’s ADC portfolio.

More about the ADC facility

The planned greenfield facility will be the company’s first end-to-end antibody drug conjugate production site.

All steps of the manufacturing process at a commercial scale will be incorporated. This includes antibody production, chemotherapy drug and linker synthesis, conjugating the drug-linker to the antibody, as well as filling of the completed ADC substance, AstraZeneca confirmed. Furthermore, this facility will be designed to emit zero carbon from its first day of operations.

“We welcome AstraZeneca’s decision to establish a manufacturing presence in Singapore for the first time. It will also be a first for AstraZeneca – an end-to-end manufacturing facility for novel antibody drug conjugates that enables precision therapy for cancer,” Png Cheong Boon, Chairman, EDB commented.

Pascal Soriot, Chief Executive Officer of AstraZeneca remarked that he is excited for the company to locate its $1.5 billion ADC manufacturing facility in Singapore.

The pharmaceutical firm stated that it is planning to begin the design and construction of the manufacturing facility by the end of 2024. It is anticipated that operations will be ready to commence from 2029.

Biologics market

According to Sigma Mostafa, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at the contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) KBI Biopharma, one of the key challenges in the biologics field is the “manufacturability of the drugs being developed”.

She explained that an exciting development in the sector over the past several years is “the diversification of the biologics structures we are seeing in the pipeline of most major pharma and biotech companies. There are a lot of conjugated products in the clinical pipeline and novel conjugation partners and chemistries are being tried”.