manufacturing Archives - Medical Design Sourcing

AstraZeneca invests $300 million to establish new cell therapy manufacturing facility in Maryland

AstraZeneca facility in Maryland

Maryland Governor Wes Moore announced that AstraZeneca would invest $300 million to construct a new manufacturing facility in Rockville, a city with roughly 70,000 inhabitants that is about 17 miles from Washington, D.C. The facility will focus on cell therapies for cancer treatment. The 84,000 square-foot facility, slated for completion in 2026, will enable global clinical trials and commercial supply of AstraZeneca’s CAR-T cancer therapies. AstraZeneca estimates the plant to create 150 new high-skilled jobs.

Incentives played a role in new plant

To support AstraZeneca’s new manufacturing facility in Rockville, Maryland, the state and county are providing financial incentives, including a $500,000 conditional loan from the Maryland Department of Commerce’s Advantage Maryland program and a $100,000 conditional grant from Montgomery County’s Economic Developm…

Moderna to build mRNA plant in Africa

As the pendulum of vaccinating the world against COVID-19 begins to swing to developing countries, Moderna (NSDQ:MRNA) will build an mRNA facility in Africa that could produce as many as 500 million 50-µg vaccine doses annually.

Its currently authorized booster has a 100-µg dose of mRNA, but the company aims to use a 50-µg dose for boosters.

Moderna is prepared to invest up to $500 million in building the facility, which would house equipment for drug substance manufacturing and potentially fill/finish and packaging.

The company has not yet selected a site for the facility but said it plans on beginning the selection process soon.

While COVID-19 vaccine production is its initial focus, Moderna’s CEO Stephane Bancel has stressed that the company has grander ambitions. Its pipeline has 20 prophylactic vaccine candidates for a range of viruses. In addition, it has several other investigational therapeutics in development.

In related news, Poli…

Pharma’s been slow to adopt Industry 4.0 — but that could change

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

The pharma industry has been relatively slow to embrace concepts such as Industry 4.0, but COVID-19 is serving as a catalyst for sweeping changes within the industry.

The philosophy has roots in a German framework that prioritizes digitization to drive manufacturing efficiency, promising that cyber-physical systems will usher in the next industrial revolution. The Industry 4.0 framework spans connectivity, analytics and AI and integrated automation technologies.

But the deployment of Industry 4.0–inspired technologies has been uneven in the pharma industry. “The industry is pretty cautious,” said John Younes, COO of Litmus Automation, the developer of an industrial edge computing platform.

Get the full story from our sister site, Pharmaceutical Processing World.

Report: New U.S. reshoring agency may loan billions for manufacturing

The head of the newly formed U.S. International Development Finance Corp. (DFC) said this week that the agency could provide tens of billions of dollars in financing to return manufacturing to the United States, according to a report by Reuters.

One of the projects it may finance is a $12 billion semiconductor plant from Taiwan, DFC CEO Adam Boehler told the news agency.

Working with the Department of Defense, the DFC recently launched a request for proposals from companies seeking financing under the Defense Production Act, which prioritizes government orders amid a war or national crisis. The defense department announced on June 22 that it will dedicate $100 million authorized by the CARES Act to boost medtech and pharmaceutical manufacturing in the U.S. The Trump administration has been pushing to return U.S. manufacturing to this country from China.

Boehler told Reuters that the new finance agency has received a lot of attention from companies, and t…