Amgen Singapore : I stand corrected

by Oliver Yu

In a previous post, I indicated that biotech manufacturing facilities in Singapore costing 200M is cheap.

It turns out that that's par for the course.

My original statement is false, but becomes true when edited thusly:

I think the [Lonza-built] Roche plant cost 290 million and the [Genentech-built] Roche plant cost 500 210 million, so if Amgen gets it done for 200 million, that's pretty cheap par for the course.

I got the 290 million figure from multiple sources:

• Pharmaceutical-Technology.com
• Roche.com.Sg

But then I mis-read the $500 million figure from the Roche Singapore About page where it says:

With a combined investment of approximately USD500 million, the site is comprised of two state-of-the-art facilities which use two different production technology platforms to manufacture biologic medicines.

(emphasis mine).

So doing the math.... both facilities cost approximately 500 million USD.  One costs 290M, so the other must cost $210M.

Thanks to a savvy reader for this correction.