AGC is aiming to make $1.5 billion in sales by 2025 and says it will continue to actively invest in facilities around the world to bolster its CDMO presence.

Contract development manufacturing organization (CDMO) AGC says its groups’ life science business forms part of its strategic initiative to aim for sales in the 200-billion-yen ($1.5 billion) range by 2025.

“We aim to be the first provider that customer call on when they are looking for a CDMO in various fields and projects. In terms of sales target, we aim to expand our sales of the life science business (including synthetic agrochemical and pharmaceuticals and biopharmaceutical CDMO services) from 44.9 billion yen [$350 million] in 2018 to 135 billion yen [$1 billion] in 2022 and 200 billion yen [$1.5 billion] or more in 2025,” a spokesperson for AGC told BioProcess Insider.

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As well as mergers and acquisitions, the CDMO has made a string of investment at global facilities and says it will continue this pattern at plants located in Japan, the US, and Europe with considerable growth anticipated in the “coming years.”

While AGC acknowledged that there are “larger CDMOs from a pure capacity viewpoint,” it said its existing and future expansions will provide “highly reliable cGMP capabilities (manufacturing and supply record, quality, commercial production capacity etc.) to more customers than now as a strategic partner and we believe we are among the top tier CDMOs when looked at holistically (capacity, technology, quality, reliability, flexibility etc.)”

Additionally, the firm said by strengthening its services with “aggressive investments” it creates capacity for current and emerging modalities, as well as various technologies.

Continued investments

In September 2016, AGC acquired Biomeva, a CDMO with facilities in Heidelberg, Germany which provides services using microbial expression technology.

In February 2017, AGC acquired CMC Biologics, a CDMO with facilities in Seattle, Washington, and Copenhagen, Denmark, offering services with mammalian and microbial hosts. Later that year, the firm rolled out an expansion at the Danish site adding five 2,000 L single-use bioreactors to be run in single unit operations or in unison, and three years later the Danish site received more investment with $192 million being spent to construct a a 19,000m²  facility.

And in June 2020, AGC paid $100 million to acquire the former AstraZeneca facility in Boulder, Colorado.

Additionally, AGC entered the cell and gene therapy end-user space through the acquisition of Molecular Medicine (MolMed) in July 2020, adding two sites in Milan and Bresso, both in Italy.

The firm picked up a second site in Colorado, buying a cell and gene therapy facility in Longmont from Novartis in July 2021 and announced in September 2021 it would expand its Heidelberg, Germany facility to increase its manufacturing capacities for customer pDNA and mRNA projects.

The spokesperson told us the CDMOs choice to continually invest is “Based on the increasing sophistication of pharmaceuticals (especially in biopharmaceuticals), the trend for pharmaceutical companies to focus their resources on research such as drug discovery, and to outsource development and manufacturing functions to CDMOs which have high levels of manufacturing technology and quality control.”