Expansion accelerates across pharma
DCAT Week featured growth plans for most companies , even as healthcare spending is expected to shift from treatment to prevention . Gregory DL Morris reports from New York
All of the companies making announcements at the start of the annual DCAT Week in New York on 21-24 March spoke of expansion plans . Companies of all sizes were represented and the presenters broadly skewed towards biologicals . There was a strong sense of the industry using the growth in technology and volume from the COVID-19 vaccine campaign as a springboard to other treatments . In the pharma outlook presentations , the realities of COVID exhaustion and budgetary constraints were expected to be manifest in an accelerated shift in emphasis from treatment to prevention . Within CDMOs , there is another shift , from public to private capital . While not a specific topic at the conference , the drive to shorten and simplify the supply chain for raw materials and intermediates was a constant through many discussions . The repatriation or regionalisation of inputs has been under way for several years , but “ North American and European supply chains are still massively delocalised to Asia ,” according to Pierre Luzeau , CEO of Seqens . “ The importance of local production for local needs becomes a competitive advantage ,” he added . “ But no customer will pay massive prices to substitute European supply for Chinese . The arbitration between Asian and regional supply has to be balanced between price and reliability .” Luzeau added that higher prices for inputs can be acceptable , even desirable in some cases , as what amounts to the price of assurance in quality and dependable delivery . Among the larger expansion programmes , Patricio Massera , CEO of AGC Biologics detailed a $ 1.6 billion series of investments from this year through 2026 . Those include expansions at existing manufacturing sites in Seattle later this year ; Longmont , Colorado , and Copenhagen in 2023 ; Heidelberg in 2023 and 2025 ; Boulder , Colorado in 2024 ; and Chiba , Japan , in 2025 . That same year , a greenfield facility is to be completed in Yokahama . Jean-Christophe Hyvert , president of biologics and cell and gene divisions at Lonza , announced CHF 1.3 billion in investments , including CHF 200 million at Portsmouth , New Hampshire , as well as additional mRNA lines in the Netherlands and
Figure 1 - Priorities of healthcare payers
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