Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing Facility Opens in Wuhan

JHL Biotech has celebrated the opening of its biopharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Wuhan, China with a ribbon-cutting ceremony held on May 10^th. The installation, based on single-use bioprocessing technology was completed in 18 months using GE Healthcare’s KUBio prefabricated cGMP-compliant facility and process solution. The company will manufacture biosimilars and monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) for late–stage clinical trials and commercial supply.

The biosimilars market is expected to grow significantly in China, reaching approximately USD 350 million in 2019, up from USD 44 million in 2009². Local manufacturing in China is a more affordable way to provide modern therapies for deadly diseases like cancer, which is the leading cause of death in China. In 2015, approximately 4.3 million new cancer cases were reported³ in the country. China's State Council’s 10-year action plan "Made in China 2025" recognizes biological medicines and medical devices as one of its key industrial focus areas⁴.

Racho Jordanov, CEO and co-founder of JHL Biotech commented, “JHL Biotech’s mission is to make quality medicines affordable to more people, and we believe one of the greatest areas of need is in Asia. It was important to us to establish our scale-up manufacturing capacity in Asia with a manufacturing facility in China capable of producing biologics to a world-class standard. JHL’s new facility in Wuhan has the same standardized GE FlexFactory™ technology as our existing site in Taiwan, which allowed us to quickly scale up to a capacity of 2,000 litres. JHL Biotech now has the largest volume of single-use cell culture capacity in Asia with the opening of our new facility in Wuhan.”

“GE Healthcare’s expertise in project management and delivery has been key in completing the factory in just 18 months, exceeding our demanding timelines and enabling us to accelerate our plans to produce next-generation biotherapeutics locally.”