Fujifilm replicates Denmark facility in North Carolina using modular approach

Holly Springs, North Carolina is home to Fujifilm Biotechnologies’ new biomanufacturing facility, one of the largest commercial-scale cell culture manufacturing sites in North America. However, the blueprint for Fujifilm’s flagship U.S. location is its large-scale production facility more than 4,000 miles away in Hillerød, Denmark.

“We had a foundation that we could build off of,” Sam Rabhan, director of construction management capital projects for Fujifilm Biotechnologies in Holly Springs, told the Advancing Life Science Construction conference, held earlier this month in North Carolina.

Fujifilm has taken a modular approach — called KojoX — to build the approximately 1.5 million-square-foot facility in Holly Springs on a 150-acre campus, which required many transatlantic trips to the company’s sister site in Hillerød.

“We were sending engineers back and forth to Denmark — I’ve been to Denmark quite a few times — to really understand how that facility was designed,” said Rabhan, who describes KojoX as a design philosophy based on an ecosystem of clonability and modularity.

“Our construction teams travelled back and forth,” he added. “We even sent subcontractors over to Denmark to understand how they put together their cleanroom panels, installing the equipment, moving things in and out of the building, and how to gain efficiency.”

Using its KojoX modular approach, Fujifilm was able to reduce design time by 70% for Holly Springs in creating a near-replica of the contract development and manufacturing organization’s commercial-scale site in Hillerød.

“We designed a model that can be cloned and replicated anywhere in the world,” according to Rabhan, who said Fujifilm’s goal is that “every time we build one of these facilities, we do it a little bit better and faster.”

The contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) has harmonized the design of its facilities, equipment, processes, and quality systems to provide faster technology transfer and scalability to customers — regardless of location — so that production can be effortlessly expanded across Fujifilm’s global network.

“We have a sister site in Denmark that runs the exact same process that we run in Holly Springs,” Rabhan said. “We made it very efficient. We learned a lot from how we constructed it in Denmark and replicated it in North Carolina.”   

Expansion continues in Holly Springs

While the grand opening of the first phase of Fujifilm’s $2 billion investment was held in September 2025, the second-phase expansion in Holly Springs is adding eight 20,000L mammalian cell culture bioreactors to the site’s existing capacity of eight 20,000L bioreactors — for a total of 16 stainless steel bioreactors. The $1.2 billion second phase will add approximately 400,000 square feet of manufacturing space.

At this month’s Advancing Life Science Construction conference, Terry Costello, vice president of life sciences for JE Dunn Construction, described Fujifilm’s ongoing building and operations at the Holly Springs site as “swallowing a whale” with the campus “both in operational start-up mode and expansion mode” simultaneously.

As part of its operational start-up mode, Rabhan said Fujifilm has sent its operations teams back and forth to Hillerød to “walk” the company’s facility in Denmark and “bring that knowledge back to North Carolina” to better operate the Holly Springs site.         

Jacobs, a technical professional services firm based in Dallas, Texas, has provided engineering, procurement and construction management services for Fujifilm’s Holly Springs campus since the project’s inception. Leveraging a “design one, build many” approach that includes maximizing prefabrication components, Jacobs contends that Holly Springs is a “replicable model” for global biomanufacturing.

Lindsay Gerding, vice president and general manager of life sciences North America at Jacobs, told Pharma Manufacturing at Holly Spring’s grand opening in September that the firm is “trying to be innovative with how we design things so we can do as much off-site with fabrication in regions where the workforce isn’t as stretched” as North Carolina.

Modularization was critical to building the Holly Springs site “to control risk” given the shortages in the market, according to Gerding. Rather than having construction workers “stick build” on site, she said large skids were preassembled in other locations and shipped to North Carolina. “You can do that [prefabrication] anywhere in the world.”

At Holly Spring’s grand opening, Jacobs CEO Bob Pragada said “modularity, flexibility, and agility in the facility starts with the design and then flows all the way through construction.” Ultimately, he added that “the physical asset ends up becoming as modular as the manufacturing process — and can be replicated in record speed.”  

Rabhan said Fujifilm spent a lot of time with Jacobs to “understand how it needs the facility constructed and what systems are needed to be brought online in order for us to turn the facility on,” while crediting a “one team” mentality with the firm for the success of the project. “We’ve learned a lot over the last couple of years.”

Fujifilm’s Holly Springs site has been recognized by the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE) as a finalist for its 2026 Facility of the Year awards, including in the innovation and operations categories. Winners will be announced next month during the ISPE International Europe Annual Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, where Fujifilm Biotechnologies CEO Lars Petersen will be a featured speaker.

“We are building an ecosystem for the long term,” Petersen told Pharma Manufacturing in January 2026 during the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. “We’re in it for something that we believe is game-changing five, 10, 15 years out.”

By linking manufacturing facilities in Europe, Japan, and the U.S., Fujifilm Biotechnologies intends to provide its customers with flexible global capacity and local supply based on cloning the CDMO’s bioproduction sites around the world.