GE to invest €150m in biopharmaceutical factory in Ireland

Four factories and a training centre to be built

General Electric is to invest €150 million in a biopharmaceutical manufacturing campus in Ireland.

GE’s Biopark Cork will feature Europe’s first Kubio: prefabricated, off-the-shelf bio-manufacturing facilities and will be owned and run by GE customers.

Kubios enables pharmaceutical companies to quickly deploy biopharmaceutical facilities in 18 months instead of the usual time of approximately three years required for traditional methods, said GE. Kubios will increase manufacturing flexibility and will be between 25% and 50% more cost-effective to build than comparable traditional facilities, it added.

Biopark Cork will host four Kubio factories owned by independent biopharma companies manufacturing proprietary medicines, with GE running centralised shared utilities, process development and site services. The campus is expected to be home to more than 500 jobs when fully operational; 400 with biopharma companies and a further 100 employed directly by GE.

Construction is expected to begin by mid-2017 and create up to 800 jobs.

Martin Shanahan, chief executive of Industrial Development Agency Ireland, said: “Ireland has won more than €10 billion in the past 10 years in biotech investment, building on a long history in pharmaceutical manufacturing and is now one of the world's top locations for biopharma, which creates significant secondary employment in construction and other services.”

To further develop biopharma manufacturing skills and expertise in Ireland, GE and the National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT) also plan to create a NIBRT-GE single-use centre of excellence at NIBRT’s Dublin facility. NIBRT expects to train up to 1,500 bioprocessing professionals annually on next-generation biologic manufacturing technologies.

Dominic Carolan, chief executive of NIBRT, said: “This will accelerate the introduction of these technologies to the biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry, helping to reduce manufacturing costs and increase the access to these valuable therapies.”