Lonza breaks ground on $500M+ Swiss manufacturing facility

Lonza’s major construction project in Switzerland is taking a big step forward.

The Swiss CDMO has broken ground on a fill-finish manufacturing site in the town of Stein, Switzerland, about 20 miles from its headquarters in Basel. The CHF 500 million ($544 million) facility was announced last summer and will be constructed on the same campus as Lonza’s current clinical drug product facility.

Peter Droc

In an email to Endpoints News, Peter Droc, the head of product services at Lonza, said the facility is still on track for completion, with operations slated to start in 2026. The facility still intends to manufacture large-scale commercial products. Additionally, Lonza expects to add around 400 full-time positions at the facility by 2026.

Droc also added that the capital being invested in the facility is entirely from Lonza and that no government assistance has been contributed.

“The new facility will enable us to provide customers with an integrated end-to-end offering across their entire product life cycle, thus increasing speed to market, flexibility and simplicity. In addition, the facility’s location is ideal due to its proximity to our existing DPS sites, our global headquarters and Basel’s life sciences cluster, which enables us to access existing infrastructure, capabilities and talent,” Droc said.

Lonza’s groundbreaking in Stein comes as the company saw a rise in customers and a growth in sales for 2022, but the manufacturer does expect a reduction in Covid sales for 2023.

Lonza will also be facing more competition in Switzerland as other manufacturers, such as Thermo Fisher, Cytiva, and local company ten23, have been turning to the company’s backyard to expand their own sites over the past year.

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