Amgen State-Of-The-Art Plant A Holiday Gift For Singapore?

Amgen is eyeing Singapore, Texas or Puerto Rico to site a plant that will sharply cut turn-around times to change drug manufacturing lines, with talent a key factor to win the company’s nod.

SINGAPORE – Three locations – Puerto Rico, Texas and Singapore – are vying for a state-of-the art manufacturing plant to be built by Amgen Inc. that will cut times to start new drug lines by two-thirds, enabling the firm to meet demand where competition is growing, with Singapore said to be the front runner ahead of a Dec. 10 board meeting to likely decide the winner, sources told PharmAsia News.

The plant will use a novel manufacturing process using plastic that allows it to implement new drug lines at this plant within three months, instead of the normal nine to 12 months for such a process, a source said.

“The decision will be made then based on talent availability and costs,” said the source who declined to be named. Amgen was not immediately available to comment on the proposed plant. [Editor’s note: this story was contributed by PharmAsia News, a publication affiliated with “The Pink Sheet” DAILY that provides in-depth coverage of Asian business and regulatory developments.]

Like other biologic firms, Amgen faces efforts by a number of local companies in Asia to compete against key products with biosimilars, a process that has seen some setbacks, but an area of frenetic activity (Also see "Korea’s Samsung Biologics Halts Rituxan Biosimilar Trials To Meet U.S, EU Standards" - Scrip, 19 Oct, 2012.).

The Economic Development Board of Singapore, which acts as the facilitator and recruiter for investments into the country, referred queries to Amgen, declining to comment.

Singapore has become something of a front-runner for the plant because of a proposal to help with the hiring of as many as 200 trained staff locally for a 20-month training course with Amgen in California that would end coinciding with the completion of the plant, enabling workers to know senior management at headquarters and immediately handle equipment, the source said.

If Singapore is awarded the plant, it would cap a banner year for its efforts to lure biomedical investments into the city state, even as local costs rise and the government has moved to restrict work visas in the face of a public backlash over rising immigration levels (Also see "Seeing Is Believing: GSK Pledges To Upgrade Key Antibiotics Plant As Witty Hosts Q3 Call From Singapore" - Scrip, 1 Nov, 2012.).

Focus On Asia

An industry consultant based in Singapore said it made sense for Amgen to base a plant in Singapore as much for the access to a talent pool as for intellectual property reasons.

“It is primarily a biologics company and has a lot of intellectual property at stake, so setting up in Singapore in Asia is like setting up in Zug [Switzerland] in Europe,” the industry consultant said.

Amgen manufactures proteins at its Thousand Oaks headquarters in California, though is increasingly shifting to a clinical focus there and has two manufacturing facilities near Boulder, Colorado for bulk manufacture of Epogen/Procrit (epoetin alfa), Prolia (denosumab), and thrombocytopenia drug Nplate (romiplostim), among others, according to the company’s website.

In Asia, Amgen has offices in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Mumbai, part of an effort to internationalize the company since 2006 (Also see "WorldGen? Amgen Takes Steps To Move Into International Markets" - Pink Sheet, 24 Jan, 2006.).

With major drug companies looking at Asia to bolster their research-and-development pipelines and expand into emerging markets, countries such as Singapore, South Korea and China eager to attract investment using specialized research parks and building up regulatory and education systems (Also see "Pharma’s Aim: Tap Innovation In Emerging Markets To Fix Woes At Home (Part 2 of 2)" - Scrip, 26 Oct, 2012.).

Singapore in particular has sought to become a hub for early-stage clinical trial work by quickly reviewing investigational new drug applications and expanding its clinical infrastructure through the public and private medical system as well as encourage patients from abroad to beef up the potential numbers of clinical trials (Also see "Singapore’s Clinical Trials Registry May Attract Wider Patient Pool" - Scrip, 9 Oct, 2012.).

It is also home to manufacturing, research and marketing operations by a host of major firms including operations run by Pfizer Inc., Novartis AG,GlaxoSmithKline PLC, and Merck & Co. Inc.( (Also see "Seeing Is Believing: GSK Pledges To Upgrade Key Antibiotics Plant As Witty Hosts Q3 Call From Singapore" - Scrip, 1 Nov, 2012.)).