The deal is an expansion of an existing production agreement between the companies and just one of several deals with large pharma companies that the Korean biotech has scooped up this year.
Pictured: BMS office in California/iStock, hapabapa
Samsung Biologics is having a busy year. The South Korean biotech announced that it has expanded an existing manufacturing agreement with Bristol Myers Squibb to include production of an unnamed cancer antibody.
The agreement will see Samsung provide manufacturing at its newest and largest manufacturing facility, Plant 4 in Sangdo, South Korea.
According to a filing, the deal is worth approximately $242 million.
“Our relationship with Bristol Myers Squibb spans over a decade, and we are proud and excited to help bring important medicines to patients around the world,” Samsung Biologics CEO John Rim said in a statement.
This is just the latest in several deals that Samsung Biologics has inked in 2023. One of the major ones was a two-part deal with Pfizer worth nearly $900 million in total.
One of the deals was a completely new manufacturing agreement worth $704 million, the largest single contract awarded to the company to date, while the other was an expansion of a previous manufacturing agreement from $183 million to $193 million. The contracts, which run through December 31, 2029, give Pfizer access to Plant 4 for production of biosimilar products, particularly for oncology and inflammation.
Samsung Biologics also struck deals with Eli Lilly, GSK and Roche this year. With its latest contract with BMS, the company has so far in 2023 won $2 billion worth of manufacturing contracts,
Though Plant 4 is currently Samsung’s latest and greatest manufacturing plant, it’s currently gearing up to build an even bigger and better one. The company announced earlier this year that it was accelerating construction of Plant 5, which will bring the company’s manufacturing capacity to 784,000 liters. The new timeline should see the new plant operational by April 2025.
Plant 4 was just completed in June of this year, marking a significant expansion of Samsung’s manufacturing capacity. The company is continuing to expand its capabilities with investments in an antibody-drug conjugate facility as well as a dedicated mRNA manufacturing plant and additional aseptic filling capacity.
“By expediting our capacity expansion and providing fully integrated services, we hope to close the gap between the demand and supply of life-saving biomedicines,” Rim said in a statement in June announcing the accelerated timeline for new Plant 5.
The new plant is part of Samsung’s second Bio Campus, which will ultimately feature four facilities and a total capacity of 720,000 liters. All four facilities will be “connected to maximize output and efficiency with automated logistics and will incorporate next-generation technologies with fully digitalized systems to offer seamless client communication,” the company said in a statement. “Upon the completion of Bio Campus II, Samsung Biologics will hold a total capacity of 1.324 million liters.”
Rim added that the facility will enable the company to support its customers across the product lifecycle.
Connor Lynch is a freelance writer based in Ottawa, Canada. Reach him at lynchjourno@gmail.com.
