BLOOMINGTON—Simtra BioPharma Solutions announced on Wednesday plans to spend more than $250 million to expand its sterile fill/finish manufacturing campus in Bloomington and create about 130 jobs.
The New Jersey-based contract development and manufacturing organization said it will build a 150,000-square-foot building to house three high-speed, automated fill lines.
The investment comes less than five months after Illinois-based Baxter International sold its biopharma operations to Boston-based private equity firm Advent International and New York-based growth investor Warburg Pincus for $4.25 billion, which rebranded the business with the Simtra name.
Simtra’s campus, located on 31 acres at 927 South Curry Pike in Bloomington, makes pre-filled medical syringes and vials. The new facility will include two syringe fill lines and one vial fill line.
According to a tax abatement agreement approved this week by the Monroe County Council, the facility’s employees are expected to make an average annual salary of $73,379. The 10-year abatement will save the company about $10.4 million in real property and personal property taxes.
CEO Franco Negron said in a news release that the company is seeing a broad increase in demand for injectable manufacturing for various drugs.
“Our customers consider our sites in Halle [Germany] and Bloomington as an extension of their manufacturing network, so we are thrilled to enhance our capabilities and resources further to help them meet their respective goals,” Negron said. “This expansion is the latest in a series of strategic, long-term investments to ensure that Simtra continues to grow with and for our customers.”
Construction on the new facility is slated to begin in June and take about two years to complete.
Additionally, Simtra said the expansion will include a new, dedicated clinical line equipped to support the company’s growing development/clinical business. The new line is designed to better accommodate projects in early development phases and keep them on-site as they scale up for commercialization.
The clinical line will be established in an existing facility on the Bloomington campus and is expected to be operational by the summer of 2025.
A spokesperson for Simtra told Inside INdiana Business the campus is currently comprised of five buildings totaling about 500,000 square feet. The company employs nearly 1,900 people across its global footprint, including just over 1,100 in the U.S., most of whom are in Bloomington.
In a joint statement, Advent International Managing Director Carmine Petrone and Warburg Pincus Managing Director Ruoxi Chen said they hope the expansion is the first of several major growth investments.
“The planned expansion is designed to meet the needs of our customers, and their patients,” Petrone and Chen said. “We’re excited for the trajectory of the business, given the dynamic industry backdrop, and aim to enable Simtra’s customers to deliver more doses of life sustaining therapies to patients.”
Simtra is currently expecting to begin expanded operations at its Germany facility, which also includes a new fill/finish facility, at the end of this year.
