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SINGAPORE: Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has opened its first Asian research and development pilot plant in Singapore.
The S$116 million invested in the plant will bring its total investment in Singapore to S$1.5 billion.
GSK said the plant will produce new medicines that are in their final phase of development.
The plant, GSK's first and only research and development (R&D) facility in Asia, is meant to support its expansion into Asia. The new state-of-the-art pilot plant is located within GSK's existing manufacturing facility in Tuas.
GSK said the plant will create synergies for both its global manufacturing operations and R&D.
GSK's senior vice president of chemical development, Dr Dermot Moynihan, said: "The purpose of this plant is to do a particular business model for GSK in manufacturing and research and development. We decided that we would co-locate the pilot plants within the manufacturing plants as well, so that we can speed up the delivery of drugs through the development cycle and into the manufacturing cycle."
GSK said this will help speed up the development of drugs and bring them to market in eight years, instead of the usual ten.
The Minister of State for Trade and Industry, S Iswaran, said at the opening ceremony of the plant that such investments will make Singapore the choice destination for high-value manufacturing investments.
He said: "Singapore recognises that manufacturing innovation is the critical link that enables drugs 'discovered in Singapore' to quickly transition to drugs 'manufactured in Singapore'.
"In this regard, GSK, with its comprehensive value chain of activities in Singapore, is well-positioned to benefit from this 'through-train' to extract synergies between upstream R&D, manufacturing process development, and commercial-scale manufacturing, to yield quantum leaps in process efficiency."
GSK's plant now hires a team of 45 scientists and technicians from Singapore, the UK and US, and the company is looking to recruit another ten to 20 more synthetic chemists.
Last year, Singapore's output for biomedical sciences manufacturing reached S$24 billion, with a value-add of S$13.4 billion. - CNA/ir/ac
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