Lonza Plans Biomanufacturing Facility in Singapore

Lonza Group (Basel, Switzerland, www.lonza.com), a custom manufacturer and fine chemicals supplier, and Singapore’s Bio*One Capital Pte. Ltd. (Singapore,  www.bio1capital.com), the investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board, are investing $250 million to jointly build a large-scale mammalian cell culture plant in Singapore for the manufacture of commercial biopharmaceuticals. The facility will be Lonza’s second large-scale mammalian manufacturing plant.

The plant, which will be located in Tuas Biomedical Park, will include as many as four mammalian bioreactor trains, each with a flexible capacity of 1000 as many as 20,000 L, inclusive of the respective purification units.

The plant will be constructed in two phases. The construction of the plant shell is already underway. The final build-out of the plant will be completed and the plant will become operational at the end of 2009 (in line with customer commitments). When fully completed, the facility will staff more than 300 people.

Lonza, Genentech team in gene expression

Separately, Lonza has granted

Genentech Inc.

(San Francisco, CA,

www.gene.com

) a nonexclusive worldwide license to its “GS Gene Expression System.”