As part of a five-year, $500-million expansion in Singapore, Merck & Co. has announced the opening of a new secondary packaging facility to support the production of vaccines and biologics, including the company’s cancer immunotherapy products, and the ground-breaking of an inhaler production facility. The new facilities are located within the company’s existing 72-acre, multi-product manufacturing hub in Tuas, Singapore.

The secondary packaging facility will house a semi-automated, vial-packaging line to produce Keytruda (pembrolizumab), Merck’s immunotherapy for treating multiple cancers, and three fully automated syringe-packaging lines to produce the company’s Gardasil9 (human papillomavirus [HPV] 9-valent vaccine, recombinant), an HPV vaccine for cervical, vaginal, vulvar, anal cancer, certain head and neck cancers and genital warts. In 2021, the site commenced the sterile filling process of Keytruda vials. Secondary packaging, cold storage and a quality control laboratory are part of the expanded facility, which further adds to the supply chain footprint for this product in Singapore. The new inhaler production facility will manufacture inhaler devices and is expected to be ready in 2026.

The new manufacturing facilities are part of a multi-year, $500-million investment over five years that started in 2020. This is in addition to $2 billion invested since the start of the company’s manufacturing operations in Singapore in 1997.

Other components of the total investment include new technology to further the company’s environmental sustainability goals and modernization of its information technology infrastructure for digitizing the facilities. The company says that the expansions will create over 100 jobs requiring manufacturing and digitalization skills over the next few years to bring the company’s total employees in Singapore to more than 1,800 over the next few years (as reported on October 5, 2022).

Source: Merck & Co.