China: Production of Biopharmaceuticals Clover Biopharmaceuticals Selects GE Biomanufacturing Platform

Clover Biopharmaceuticals has selected GE Healthcare’s Flexfactory, a biomanufacturing platform based on single-use technologies, for its new facility located in Changxing, Zhejiang in China.

Chalfont St Giles/UK and Changxing/China — The new facility will mainly be used to produce biological fusion protein products, including innovative drugs and biosimilars. The biomanufacturing facility includes two 2,000-liter bioreactors from GE, and it will be operational in the latter half of 2018.

Clover Biopharmaceuticals’ new production facility will be located in one of the national economic development zones in China, Changxing Economic and Technological Development Zone, where a new biopharmaceutical industrial cluster is being developed. China plans to build up to twenty science parks for biomedicine by 2020 to accelerate local research and development activities. In 2015, the Chinese biopharmaceutical market was valued approximately at $ 13 billion, and the estimated annual growth rate (CAGR) is around 13 % for the next few years.

Dr. Peng Liang, Co-founder, Chairman and President of Clover Biopharmaceuticals said that Flexfactory represents the latest in biomanufacturing technologies, and would help the company to establish flexible production capacity quickly, while fulfilling good manufacturing practices (GMP) requirements.

The first therapeutic product produced using this biomanufacturing platform is SCB-808, a prefilled syringe formulation Enbrel (etanercept) biosimilar candidate for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.

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