General Electric Co.'s new pre-built biopharmaceutical factories were shipped to China from Germany in 62 modules, traveling along the Rhine and Yangtze rivers and the sea between them. PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY

General Electric Co has a new product for China: a pre-built biopharmaceutical factory.

Consisting of 62 modules, the Connecticut-based multinational conglomerate's first factory was delivered to a biotech zone in Wuhan via land and sea in a two-month journey that started in Germany, where it was built. When the units arrived, they were assembled in 11 days. The pre-built factory will occupy about 2,400 square meters (25,833 square feet), approximately half the size of a US football field.

"It's really very innovative and different, because today 98 percent of biopharma factories are still stick-built, meaning you design and construct the building first, then it takes around a year to get it up and running," said Olivier Loeillot, general manager of GE Healthcare Life Sciences Asia. "Our concept is totally different because you do everything in parallel, which enables you to save up to one and half years in total. This is really what is critical for companies developing biopharmaceuticals: speed," he said.

GE’s pre-built factory can cut the typical cost of $200 million to $500 million to build a drug manufacturing facility by 45 percent, according to Loeillot.

Biologics, short for biological products and also called biopharmaceuticals, include a wide range of products like vaccines, blood components, and allergenics. They can consist of sugars, proteins, nucleic acids, or any combination of these substances, and can also contain a living entity, making the manufacturing process more difficult and "prohibitively expensive," GE said.

Six of 10 top-selling medicines are biologics, which are used in the treatment for cancers and demand for insulin, and sales of biologics over the past six years have grown at 10 percent per year to $170 billion, according to GE

"China's biopharmaceutical industry has a critical need for the high-quality biologics manufacturing capacity that GE's modular solution enables, and the speed and cost at which GE's solution allows pharma companies to deploy this capacity can give them a crucial competitive edge," Conor McKechnie, a spokesman for GE's life science department, told China Daily via e-mail.

China is the first country to receive the GE pre-made factory, and McKechnie said it's a good market for them because it already has a well-established traditional pharmaceutical industry and the industrial infrastructure, so expertise is present and available.

The pre-made factory was purchased by JHL Biotech, a biologics manufacturer in Taiwan that is backed by Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

"Our vision is to make world-class biopharmaceuticals affordable and accessible to all patients," said Racho Jordanov, president and CEO at JHL.

"This revolutionary modular facility is part of the realization of our vision in Asia, where US-made biopharmaceuticals are out of reach, and there is a large unmet medical need," he said.