Australia’s CSL Opens New Biomanufacturing Facility
The Australian biopharmaceutical company CSL Limited has opened a new biomanufacturing facility, the CSL Behring Biotechnology Manufacturing Facility, in Broadmeadows, Australia, a suburb of Melbourne.
The facility is located adjacent to CSL Behring's manufacturing plant for plasma products and will produce recombinant therapies on a large scale for international clinical trials.
The first therapy to be manufactured in the new biotech facility will be a blood-clotting factor (rVIIa-FP) for the treatment of hemophilia. This is one of several longer-acting clotting factors being developed by CSL which aims to significantly reduce the number of injections required to maintain normal blood clotting in people with bleeding disorders. Clinical trials of rVIIa-FP are expected to begin later this year in the United States, Europe, and Australia.
Strategic co-investment from the Australian and Victorian governments, announced in 2010, contributed to the project. The biotech facility is part of a AUD $257-million (US $240-million) manufacturing expansion at the company’s Broadmeadows site, which will see it play an increasingly important role in CSL's global operations. The total investment is expected to quadruple Broadmeadows' manufacturing capacity and export potential by 2018 and generate more than 240 jobs, according to the company
CSL is a producer of vaccines and plasma protein biotherapies. It has major facilities in Australia, Germany, Switzerland and the United States, and on global basis, approximately 12,000 employees in nearly 30 countries.
Source: CSL
