Thermo Fisher Scientific expands media manufacturing site in Scotland

Published: 17-Jun-2015

Facility delivers manufacturing redundancy and increases supply assurance for global biologic drug discovery and production

Products essential for the production of drugs and vaccines will be manufactured in Scotland at a new specialised factory near Glasgow.

Thermo Fisher Scientific, has expanded its existing campus in Inchinnan, Scotland, with the addition of a new facility to produce dry powder media. The product, sold by Thermo Fisher as Gibco Advanced Granulation Technology (AGT) Cell Culture Media, is a crucial raw material used to manufacture biologics, including vaccines, anticancer therapeutics and other life-saving drugs. Using AGT media offers biologics producers the benefits of traditional liquid media without the associated cost, storage and transportation issues.

The £14m investment will increase the company's capabilities to support the rising demand for its cell culture products and reinforces its supply chain of the raw material for customers in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), the Americas and Asia. The new facility will add to the Inchinnan site’s existing manufacturing operations, which produce liquid media for a range of research and production applications, and complement another Thermo Fisher facility in New York.

The new factory has also been designed for future expansion with features including a removable external wall, allowing new equipment to be installed quickly to scale up production.

'This is a strategically important facility that will secure supplies for our target markets all over the world,' said Mark Smedley, President of Europe, Middle East and Africa, Life Sciences Solutions, for Thermo Fisher. 'It’s important to choose the right location for a factory of this significance, and we felt the depth of experience, skills and expertise at Inchinnan made it the perfect place to make this investment.'

The company’s AGT products are expected to be used in the production of a new influenza drug, and were recently used in the manufacture of a drug candidate to fight dengue fever, which affects more than 2 million people in Africa each year. Both examples illustrate the growing need among pharmaceutical companies for a reliable stream of cell culture media.

Gibco AGT cell culture media is used in a large number of commercial and late-phase drugs. This offering provides biopharmaceutical customers and CMO partners with a ready-to-use media format that eliminates time-consuming steps in media preparation and uses only Animal Origin Free (AOF) components.

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