April 21, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Novo Nordisk , headquartered in Bagsvaerd, Denmark, announced today that it is expanding its production facilities in Chartres, France. The company plans to invest more than 100 million euros to build a new production facility at its existing 31,000-square-meter location.
Over the last 15 years the company has invested 300 million euros in France. It currently employs 1,100 at the Chartre location. It also employed another 300 people in its Paris affiliate. The expansion, which is designed to add capacity to its diabetes treatment production, will create about 250 new jobs once it goes into operation in three to four years.
“Novo Nordisk has been operating in France for more than 50 years,” said Lar Rebien Sorensen, president and chief executive officer of Novo Nordisk, in a statement. “Over the years we have built a very strong organization in France, and our site in Chartres is today one of our most important strategic production sties. With the coming expansion we will further strengthen Chartres’ position in our global product supply organization.”
This expansion is only the most recent in efforts to expand its global network. In 2015, Novo Nordisk committed up to $2 billion to expand its facility in North Carolina that manufactures active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) and a plant in Denmark that supports the company’s oral GLP-1 analogue pipeline.
The company has also begun building a manufacturing facility in Denmark to make its hemophilia drugs, investing $225 million. It’s planning to build a plant in Iran for $78 million that manufactures insulin, and is opening a facility in Russia.
And in 2014, Novo Nordisk invested $100 million in a purification plant in Bagsvaerd, Denmark and bought a 180,000-square-feet bioprocessing facility in New Hampshire.
Novo Nordisk, unlike many large pharmaceutical companies, manufactures most of its products itself. “Some components for device systems are outsourced,” Mike Rulis, a company spokesman, told Biopharma-Reporter in 2015, “and the API for one of our smaller products is in-licensed, but everything else is made by Novo Nordisk.” The product he was referring to was Prandin, a Boehringer Ingelheim tablet for Type 2 diabetes.
He went on to say, “It serves us well as we can apply and control our same systems such as IT and quality globally.”
Research funded by the company was recently presented at ENDO 2016 on April 4, the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society, held in Boston. The research was focused on the company’s drug liraglutide. Patients with prediabetes who were overweight or obese were given 3.0 mg of the drug for three years along with diet and exercise.
“Treatment with subcutaneous liraglutide 3.0 mg for three years, combined with a reduced-calorie diet and increased physical activity, can help people to not only lose weight, but also reduce the risk of Type 2 diabetes and improve cardiometabolic risk factors, which may ultimately reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases—the number one cause of death globally,” said the study’s lead author, Ken Fujioka, director of nutrition and metabolic research, and director for weight management at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.
Liraglutide is marketed as Victoza and Saxenda, both by Novo Nordisk.
