Emergent BioSolutions investing $50M, adding 60 jobs to fill-finish facility

Emergent BioSolutions continues to expand its vaccine work as it moves toward its stated goal of reaching $1 billion in revenues. Those efforts include an expansion of its Camden fill-finish facility in Baltimore.

The Gaithersburg, Maryland-based biotech said Thursday that it will invest $50 million over the next three years to expand the 77,000 square-foot facility by another 45,000 square feet, a move that will lead to another 60 jobs by the time it is complete in 2021. That is on top of about 50 jobs the plant has added in the last few years, a spokesperson said in an email.

"The expansion of our Camden facility is a significant and impactful capital investment that will generate measurable benefits for our clients," Sean Kirk, senior VP of manufacturing operations and head of its CDMO business, said in a statement. "This investment in innovative and flexible technology not only expands our customer-centric offerings to support future growth, but also builds upon our history of quality to help ensure the utmost focus on patient safety in pursuit of our corporate mission—to protect and enhance life."

The expansion comes a year after Emergent picked up a plant in Canton, Massachusetts, from Sanofi. That facility in November was approved to manufacture ACAM2000, a smallpox vaccine. The FDA approval came well ahead of expectations. CEO Daniel Abdun-Nabi previously said the license was expected to arrive in 2018.

Emergent acquired the smallpox vaccine and the plant through a $125 million deal with Sanofi. Under a CDC deal, Sanofi was working to transfer the upstream portion of the vaccine’s production process from Austria to Canton. Now, the vaccine—the cornerstone of the U.S. government’s smallpox preparedness efforts—is to be manufactured domestically