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- Publication：2015/12/1
Samsung BioLogics, which is partnered up on biologics projects with a who's who of Western drugmakers, moved its biosimilars effort forward significantly this month with an EU recommendation for a copy of Pfizer's ($PFE) Enbrel that it developed with Biogen ($BIIB). To ensure it has the capacity for that and all of its other projects, it says it will build yet another plant that will make it the largest for-hire biologics maker in the world.
The South Korean company will build the 180,000-liter-capacity facility next to its two other biologics manufacturing plants in Songdo. It laid out plans for the 850 billion Korean won ($740 million) facility in a filing, The Wall Street Journal reported.
That is in addition to the 150,000-liter, $700 million plant it announced earlier this year. When the new facility is wrapped up in September 2018, Samsung's Songdo site will house three plants with a combined 360,000 liters of capacity.
Samsung Group got into biologics manufacturing in 2011 as a way to diversify away from its slowing mobile phone business. It pledged to invest $2 billion to become an expert in biologics manufacturing. A Samsung exec boasted that its manufacturing know-how would enable the company to make biosimilars at half the cost of what Western drugmakers would have to charge.
It quickly picked up work from Big Pharma and biotech players like Biogen, Bristol-Myers Squibb ($BMY), Roche ($RHHBY) and Merck ($MRK). As such, it has found itself sometimes working with partners against some of its clients. It has a contract to manufacture an undisclosed number of biologics for Roche, but Samsung Bioepis, the joint venture it has with Biogen, is working on biosimilars of Roche's cancer blockbuster Herceptin andAvastin.
It is also sometimes working on the same biosimilars with different clients. While it and Biogen just won the EU nod for the Enbrel biosimilar Benepali, Samsung and Merck recently won approval in South Korea of their copycat version of Enbrel. Pfizer, for its part, recently acquired Hospira, which is working with Samsung's South Korean competitor Celltrion on biosimilars. They have a version of Merck's blockbusterRemicade approved in Europe that has been vacuuming up market share there.
- read the WSJ story (sub. req.)