Fujifilm Biotech To Invest $5.6M In R&D Facilities And Equipment

Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies announced that it has invested more than $5.6 million in new laboratories and equipment to expand its process development capabilities.

The company is currently expanding its R&D facilities in both the Billingham, UK and Research Triangle Park (RTP), NC, USA sites. The Billingham site installed the first TAP ambr250 automated bioreactor system for microbial fermentations in order to accelerate development of scalable processes using High Throughput technology for biopharmaceutical production. This is the first time a CDMO in the Billingham site has had an automated bioreactor system for microbial fermentations installed.

In addition, three laboratories at the UK site have received new robotic chromatography platforms, among other equipment.

Dr Mark Carver, SVP of R&D and Innovation at FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies, said that these new investments will enable the company to better provide effective biologics manufacturing. “Our ambr15 system has been working continuously since its installation in our mammalian cell culture laboratories 15 months ago, and we look forward to broadening our offering also to microbial fermentations by running multiple, single-use fermentations on this firstly-introduced ambr250,” Carver said.

The company also added four new process development labs and new equipment for both process design and analytical support to increase development capacity for future projects.

Dr. Carver said, “All of this new equipment, combined with the experimental design expertise of our highly trained scientists will allow us to produce ‘High Throughput Scale Down’ data for better process understanding, thereby enabling our customers to proceed more quickly to larger scale manufacture.”