Editor’s (re)View: Lonza, Thermo Fisher, Fujifilm lay out expansion plans at DCAT Week 2025
Contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) from around the world gathered in New York City for Drug, Chemical & Associated Technologies (DCAT) Week, March 17-20. Billed as the premier event for the global biopharma manufacturing value chain, major players in the CDMO industry gave updates on their businesses and infrastructure investments during Monday’s member company announcement forum.
Some companies that made presentations at DCAT Week have adopted an acquisition strategy, others are building infrastructure, and some have taken a hybrid approach.
Lonza
As the world’s largest CDMO by revenue, Lonza led off the opening session at DCAT Week. Stefan Egli, Lonza’s business unit head for mammalian, discussed the company’s recent initiative to become a “pure-play” CDMO under its One Lonza strategy announced in December 2024.
Lonza’s restructuring is on target to “go live” on April 1, Egli said. It will take the company from three autonomous divisions with nine underlying units to three integrated business platforms: Integrated Biologics (mammalian and drug product services), Advanced Synthesis (hybrid chemistry and biology solutions), and Specialized Modalities (cell and gene, mRNA, microbial, and bioscience).
“On the mammalian side, we see that the demand is outperforming the supply over the next years,” according to Egli, who noted that “the mammalian capacity will be at an 80% utilization rate — which is a challenge in itself.”
In 2024, Lonza acquired for $1.2 billion the Roche facility in Vacaville, California, one of the world’s largest biologics manufacturing facilities, which Egli said has doubled Lonza’s large-scale mammalian capacity. At the Vacaville site, the CDMO is looking to invest $500 million in technologies such as automation, while retaining the existing 750 employees.
“The team there is very skilled,” Egli said. “We have complemented the team with some Lonza expertise to make that a CDMO site.”
Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies
With an $8 billion global manufacturing investment, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies is looking to start generating revenue from its capital expenditures, with about $4 billion of that infrastructure operationalized by the end of 2025. CEO Lars Petersen told DCAT Week that the CDMO is building identical large-scale production facilities in Europe and the U.S., designed to modularly and seamlessly integrate manufacturing regardless of location.
“We are using that for an ecosystem where we are basically designing, constructing, and operating all our sites in the same manner,” Petersen said. “This is something we have talked about in this industry for many years, but we are actually doing it.”
At Fujifilm’s Hillerød, Denmark site, the company added six mammalian cell bioreactors, bringing the facility’s total current capacity to twelve 20,000L bioreactors — which is Europe’s largest end-to-end biopharma manufacturing site, according to the company. Over the next six to nine months, Petersen said the CDMO will add eight 20,000L bioreactors in Holly Springs, North Carolina.
“The need for drugs in the next five years will be one of the biggest challenges in the [monoclonal antibodies] space,” according to Petersen, who said Fujifilm is making infrastructure investments to help meet the high demand for mAbs which continues to grow.
Globally, Petersen said “there’s seven billion liters of capacity in the mAbs space right now — the world needs 12 and a half [billion liters],” which he contends amounts to “more than 360 bioreactors of 15,000L scale in five years.”
Thermo Fisher Scientific
Jennifer Cannon, president of commercial operations for Thermo Fisher Scientific’s pharma services, provided an update on how the company is aligning with industry needs and long-term demand. Cannon said Thermo Fisher is making strategic expansions in 2025 to “support growth in our capacity and capabilities across a really wide range of modalities and drug formats,” including last month’s $4.1 billion acquisition of Solventum’s purification and filtration business used in the production of biologics.
This year, the company is expanding its drug substance/biologics site in St. Louis, Missouri, which provides full mammalian cell process development, analytics, and end-to-end cGMP manufacturing services. For biologics at the St. Louis site, Cannon said Thermo Fisher remains “small to mid-scale at this stage” and will be adding four additional 5,000L bioreactors. “We’ll be building out another four x2 — that’ll take us up to 16, 2,000L bioreactors and we’ll be soon investing to expand 5,000L at capacity as well,” she added.
Thermo Fisher is adding to its oral solid dose facilities in several locations in the U.S., including Cincinnati, Ohio, and Greenville, North Carolina. Cannon highlighted Thermo Fisher’s “significant expansion” at its site in Plainville, Massachusetts, which provides both solid dose form manufacturing/packaging and sterile dose manufacturing. The expanded capabilities will include “enabling” antibody-drug conjugate (ADC), high-speed, and development lines, she said.
Cannon noted that Thermo Fisher in Q4 of 2024 introduced its Accelerator Drug Development solution for emerging biotech and large pharma companies, which provides a suite of manufacturing, clinical research, and supply chain services — including small molecule, biologics, and cell and gene therapies — from pre-clinical to commercialization.
The Accelerator Drug Development offering “integrates both our CDMO network, with over 60 sites globally, with our CRO clinical research patient enrollment capabilities,” Cannon said. To better integrate CDMOs with CROs, she said Thermo Fisher is spending $1.5 million for “digital enablement that will allow better visibility at the site level” by “seeing demand signals that happen with our patient enrollment sites to clinical trial sites.”
While it’s a dynamic and exciting time for the CDMO industry, Cannon told the DCAT Week audience “it’s also an apprehensive time” from a geopolitical and funding perspective. “We’ve been listening very acutely to our biopharma and biotech customers in trying to serve their needs as they embark upon the next five years,” she said.
