WuXi using Thermo Fisher to equip 28,000L single-use site in China

08-May-2017 - Last updated on 09-May-2017 at 13:53 GMT

A WuXi Biologics facility tipped to be the world’s largest single-use mammalian cell culture site will be equipped with disposable systems from Thermo Fisher.

Construction on the $150m (€138m) facility in Wuxi City, China, began in 2015, and the contract manufacturing organisation (CMO) has said it will be the largest mammalian cell culture manufacturing site in the world based on disposable equipment when it opens this year.

And the planned 28,000L of bioreactor capacity is being supplied by Thermo Fisher through fourteen 2,000L single-use systems, Dirk Tillich – VP of Global Sales at Thermo Fisher Scientific owned company Finesse Solutions – told delegates at last month’s BPI European Summit in Amsterdam.

As well as the clinical and commercial scale vessels, Thermo Fisher has supplied ten single-use bioreactors as seed vessels at the site, along with glass vessels and perfusion equipment at an on-site plant which opened its doors last year as the first phase in the $150m project.

The WuXi plant – located about 100km west of Shanghai – will manufacture a recombinant soluble LAG-3 protein on behalf of Prima Biomed among the deals already announced by the CMO.