GSK begins £92 million expansion of UK site
pharmafile | March 22, 2017 | News story | Manufacturing and Production, Research and Development | GSK, UK
GSK has officially broken ground on the expansion of its site in County Durham. The expanded site will be an aseptic sterile facility that will make liquid biopharmaceuticals, located at its manufacturing base at Barnard Castle.
The Barnard Castle location currently employs more than 1,110 people and the expansion will see hundreds of jobs created to create the facility. Beyond this, further roles will be created once the facility is up and running in the projected four-year timescale it will take to completion. GSK employs a total of 16,000 people across the UK, with 6,000 being employed in manufacturing jobs.
The facility itself will focus on making injectable liquids for HIV, respiratory and auto-immune disease treatments. The expansion will boost the current production capacity of the facility of 500,000 packets of products, daily.
The move comes as part of a wider £275 million investment across three of GSK’s manufacturing sites, with Montrose, in Scotland, and Ware, in Hertfordshire, being the location of the other sites. The continued investment in UK sites should go some way to easing jitters over whether Brexit could cause an exodus of such investment.
In separate manufacturing news for GSK, it has not stopped at breaking ground at the UK facility and has also begun construction on a production plant in Germany. The €162 facility is based in Marburg, Germany, and will house the production of its meningococcal B vaccine, Bexsero. The eventual opening of the facility will mean that GSK is able to produce its vaccine in-house, as opposed to its current system that sees Novartis produce it for GSK. The facility is expected to be completed by the third quarter of 2020.
Ben Hargreaves
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