Fujifilm opens expanded UK biomanufacturing site

Part of a growing global network to develop and produce complex medicines, Fujifilm Biotechnologies on Wednesday held the grand opening of its expanded site in Teesside, UK, which the company contends is Britian’s largest single-use biopharmaceutical contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) facility.

The 110,000 square-foot manufacturing facility in northeast England, which will be operational in the first half of 2026, includes 2,000L and 5,000L single-use bioreactors — with a total capacity up to 19,000L — to provide small- and mid-scale antibody production. At the UK site, Fujifilm Biotechnologies will leverage an internally developed and fully automated downstream purification system called SymphonX, designed to help solve the complexities of bioprocessing by simplifying material demand and scale-up.

“With this manufacturing expansion, we are inaugurating the UK’s first single-use node in our global KojoX network,” Fujifilm Biotechnologies CEO Lars Petersen said at Wednesday’s grand opening, noting KojoX’s modular biomanufacturing and facility design approach, which standardizes equipment and “harmonizes” quality systems “to allow faster change over, seamless technology transfers” between sites regardless of location.

The UK expansion in Teesside will closely align with Fujifilm's biomanufacturing facility in Toyama, Japan, providing rapid and seamless technology transfer capabilities, according to Petersen. “We can help biomanufacturing partners scale quickly, safely, and predictable across sites and regions,” Petersen added.

In December 2025, Fujifilm completed construction of one of Japan’s largest bio CDMO facilities at its Toyama Second Factory in Toyama Prefecture, marking the company’s first antibody drug manufacturing plant in Japan. The facility, operated by Fujifilm Toyama Chemical and slated to begin operations in 2027, will serve as its bio CDMO hub in Asia with two 5,000L and two 2,000L single-use mammalian cell culture bioreactors designed to support manufacturing of antibody drugs and antibody-drug conjugates.

Fujifilm’s £400 million investment (approximately $548 million) in the existing Teesside site includes a 102,200 square-foot laboratory for high-throughput and continuous process development capabilities — doubling the existing lab footprint.

“With the Bioprocess Innovation Centre UK, what we call BIC UK, we are establishing the largest multi-modality process development laboratory in the country,” Petersen said. “We’re enabling true end-to-end delivery, from process development in BIC UK to clinical and commercial supply, with our flexible and scalable manufacturing capabilities.”

Modularity, flexibility, and scalability

Fujifilm has built identical large-scale production facilities in Denmark and the U.S., which are designed to modularly and seamlessly integrate manufacturing. In September 2025, the company held the grand opening of its $3.2 billion biomanufacturing site in Holly Springs, North Carolina — one of the largest commercial-scale cell culture manufacturing sites in North America, according to the CDMO. 

By linking manufacturing facilities in Europe, Japan, and the United States, Fujifilm Biotechnologies intends to provide its customers with flexible global capacity and local supply to meet their evolving needs. It’s a modular and agile approach, based on cloning its bioproduction sites globally, that predates current geopolitical and trade tensions but is seen by the company as a hedge against the world’s supply chain volatility.

“In a complex geopolitical landscape, our connected modular approach supports local-for-local supply while retaining the flexibility to scale globally,” Petersen said. “From Teesside to Toyama and beyond, we are building the industry’s largest interconnected modular network to revolutionize how complex medicines are developed and produced at scale.” 

Over the past decade, Fujifilm has invested more than £5 billion (approximately $6.8 billion) and allocated two-thirds of its annual capital expenditure to help grow the company’s global CDMO business.  

“We are building an ecosystem for the long term,” Petersen told Pharma Manufacturing last month 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.”