Wacker Chemie has opened a new production facility for biologics in Jena, Germany. The new plant is part of the Munich-based chemical company’s investment program to enlarge its biotech operations. The expansion, together with the new building for process development and quality control already completed last year, brings Wacker’s total investment in the Jena facility to some $24 million.

Wacker has substantially boosted capacity at Jena in order to cope with a growing need for high-efficiency biologics production processes, and to meet rising customer demand. The existing GMP-certified facility has doubled its production area. A completely new facility for product-purification enables as much as three times higher product yields per batch, the company boasts, and the new unit meets the GMP requirements of both the FDA and the EMEA.

To accommodate growing customer inquiries, the facilities of Wacker Biotech GmbH have been greatly expanded over the last two years. The investment by the Wacker Group at Jena’s Beutenberg campus encompassed two projects: expansion of the GMP facility, and a new lab building for process development and quality control. The latter was built and put into operation in 2009.

“We now have an ideal system for developing the sophisticated processes and analytical techniques of modern, microbe-based biologics,” explained Dr. Thomas Maier, managing director of Wacker Biotech GmbH. “This allows Wacker to optimize the entire process chain, from lab operations to industrial GMP production. Customers thus benefit from a full process and analysis package provided from a single source. And with the expansion of our production capacities, we can now make our innovative Esetec secretion technology available to still more customers.”