Repligen finishes plant expansion and forecasts higher tech revenues in 2015

13-Feb-2015 - Last updated on 13-Feb-2015 at 13:59 GMT

Repligen expects higher tech revenues in 2015

Repligen has finished an expansion at its US filtration system facility eight months after bolstering its offering in this area by buying a platform from Refine Technology.

The US firm spent $4m (€3.2m) to add 11,000 square feet of manufacturing space for the alternating tangential flow system at the facility in Waltham, Massachusetts, which also has a dedicated assembly area.

Repligen began kitting out the facility for the acquired Refine Technology business in November in a project that also saw it spend $2m to overhaul existing equipment, add more cell culture areas and production space for its ELISA kits and OPUS chromatography columns.

The firm has also set aside a further 7,500 square feet for future expansion in a bid to “remain flexible and responsive to the needs of its biopharmaceutical customers and life sciences partners.”

Tech sales

This is in keeping with comments made by incoming CEO Tony Hunt, who replaces Walter Herlihy in May.

Hunt plans to expand Repligen’s business beyond Protein A through acquisitions in the biomanufacturing technology space according to the Boston Business Journal.

In a US SEC filing in January, Repligen said its revenue for the 12 months ended December 31 will be about $63m (€55m), which would be an increase on the $47m it posted in 2013.

Protein A is used to capture monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) and is the product with which Repligen generates the majority of its revenue - around 75% - by supplying it to customers like EMD Millipore and GE Healthcare.

But this is changing.

In 2013, around 15% of the firm’s revenue - $5.6m - came from the sale of bioprocessing technologies with the remaining 10% coming from royalty revenues from licensing agreements.

Last year, however, the proportion of technology revenue increased 27% “driven by strength in sales of products that we sell directly to end users including partial year sales of the ATF system” according to Repligen.

For 2015, the firm expects revenue to be in the $69m to $72m range and says that a full year of ATF sales will be a key growth driver.

On a more negative note, the proportion of revenue Repligen generates through tech sales is also likely to increase as a result of Pfizer's decision to pull out of a spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) accord earlier this month.

Repligen is due to announce its full year results in March.