Syngene’s acquisition of its first US manufacturing facility not due to geopolitical tensions
India-based contract research, development, and manufacturing organization (CRDMO) Syngene International recently secured its first foothold in the United States, paying $36.5 million to Emergent BioSolutions for the biologics site. However, U.S. trade policy was not the driving factor for the purchase, according to Alex Del Priore, Syngene’s senior vice president for development and manufacturing services.
The acquisition is “something that’s been in the planning for quite some time,” Del Priore told Pharma Manufacturing. “People ask: ‘Did you do it because of tariffs or geopolitical risk?’ I would like to say we were that smart, but I don’t think that was the case. It was part of our strategy all along.”
Del Priore describes the purchase of the Baltimore facility as a “natural next step” as Syngene looks to grow its CRDMO business globally, noting that the U.S. is the largest pharmaceutical market in the world. At the same time, he acknowledges that the current geopolitical environment has reinforced the importance of having a global footprint to target the fast-growing monoclonal antibody (mAb) market.
“To have access to the clients that call the U.S. their home turf is important,” Del Priore said. “Maybe 60% of all the U.S. clients prefer to keep their business in the region. This acquisition allows us to provide options to our clients. They can look at our assets that are located in India and now those in the U.S. in Baltimore.”
The Baltimore facility is equipped with mAb production lines and will expand the CRDMO’s total single-use bioreactor capacity to 50,000L for large molecule discovery, development, and manufacturing services. The site has four suites and the first one will be started up by the end of 2025, according to Del Priore, complementing Syngene’s three R&D and manufacturing sites in India.
“We’re a full-service provider all the way from discovery through development into making GMP batches for first-in-human clinical trials and extended into late-stage trials, and then on into commercialization,” Del Priore said. “We do the bulk of our development work in India and — up until this acquisition — did all of our supply of material, both drug substance and drug product, from India for clients around the world.”
The acquisition, completed in March 2025, will allow Syngene to offer services ranging from cell line development, process optimization, and both clinical and commercial supply, with the Baltimore site available for client projects in the second half of 2025.
The facility’s recent history
Emergent, which last year shut down the Baltimore site in a corporate restructuring, has the option of securing manufacturing capacity from the facility in the future under the terms of the acquisition Syngene. In 2022, a congressional report revealed that hundreds of millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines were destroyed due to quality problems at Emergent’s Baltimore plant.
“The site had been originally a mAb production facility and during Operation Warp Speed, as part of the COVID response, the U.S. government came in and deemed the site as one that needed to be converted to produce vaccines,” Del Priore said. “The facility was converted back to a mAb site and had been started up by Emergent. For strategic reasons on Emergent’s side, it was shut down and Syngene was then able to purchase the facility.”
The “big initiative” for Syngene — which has over 8,000 employees — is restaffing the site, which Del Priore said will be done through a combination of “local talent” and supplemented with the company’s staff in India and bringing those individuals to Baltimore to “oversee the integration of the facility.”
Emergent had more than 400 employees at the site but initially Syngene plans to hire about 100 positions “as the business comes into the facility and the utilization picks up,” he said.
The biologics business is “one of our key growth areas in the portfolio and this is the third acquisition we’ve made in about the last 18 months,” Del Priore added.
In December 2023, Syngene completed the acquisition of a multi-modal biologics manufacturing facility in Bangalore, India from Stelis Biopharma Ltd, adding 20,000L of installed drug substance capacity including a high-speed, commercial scale fill-finish unit.
Looking ahead
Baltimore is located near key biotechnology hubs in the Northeast, according to Syngene, which anticipates seeing demand from U.S. mAb developers who need direct access for domestic production, as well as companies in other countries that require American manufacturing infrastructure.
“Part of what we have is the scale and advantage to transfer everything that we’ve learned in India to the U.S., so it’s not like we’re trying to do it for the first time,” Del Priore said.
The Indian CRDMO sector is positioned to benefit from outsourcing and recent geopolitical dynamics, with the potential to grow from an industry currently valued at $3 billion to $3.5 billion to between $22 billion to $25 billion by 2035. That’s the finding of a 2025 report from the Boston Consulting Group and the Innovative Pharmaceutical Services Organization (IPSO), a new consortium of 11 India-based CRDMOs including Syngene.
Del Priore said IPSO is trying to strengthen the Indian ecosystem particularly in the area of biologics, “so that we can source more things from the India region to reduce our reliance and dependency on supply chain shocks that may occur from time to time.”
In April, Syngene reported that its fourth-quarter fiscal year 2025 revenue from operations was up 11% year-on-year and reached a milestone — crossing the Rs. 1,000 Cr mark for the first time. For fiscal year 2026, the CRDMO expects revenue growth in the “early teens” driven by its research, development and manufacturing services.
“Looking at the year ahead, while the wider global market dynamics remain uncertain, we expect the business momentum to continue with pipeline build in both small and large molecules, supported by new pilot programs and conversion of existing pilots in discovery services,” Peter Bains, Syngene’s managing director and CEO, said in a statement.
