Takeda invests $760M+ into new plasma-derived therapy manufacturing site in Japan

The Japanese pharma giant Takeda will be making a significant investment close to home as it expands its capabilities in plasma therapy manufacturing.

Takeda announced on Thursday that it will be constructing a new manufacturing facility to produce plasma-derived therapies or PDTs. According to a Takeda release, it plans to invest $761.8 million into the project, marking its largest investment into an expansion of manufacturing capacity in Japan and will be the largest PDT manufacturing site in the country.

The pharma additionally wrote that the new plant will be in the Juso area of Osaka, where Takeda has had a manufacturing presence since 1915 and broke ground on a new production site in 2019. The new facility plans to come online in 2030 and will be able to produce more than 5 times more therapies than its current PDT site in Narita, Japan.

Takeda is not receiving any funds from the Japanese government or the government of Osaka Prefecture at the moment but it is open to exploring those options in the future, a Takeda spokesperson told Endpoints News in an email.

Thomas Wozniewski

Thomas Wozniewski, the global manufacturing and supply officer at Takeda, wrote in a statement Thursday that the site will produce more than 2 million liters of product per year.

With the new site, Takeda hopes to bring products to patients reliant on PDTs, including those with diseases for which there are no alternative treatments, Wozniewski said.

The Takeda spokesperson added the site would be around 26,000 square meters or over 279,000 square feet. Construction is slated to start sometime in 2024 and will have a headcount of around 400 workers.

“Plasma-derived therapies remain an area of high unmet need in Japan. While demand is growing, timely diagnosis and treatment rates with immunoglobulins (IG) are currently much lower than in other parts of the world. Additionally, plasma-derived therapies are a core strategic business and central to our capital allocation strategy,” the Takeda spokesperson said.

Takeda has been putting a lot of cash into building out its manufacturing apparatus for plasma-derived therapies beyond Japan. Last year, Takeda announced a 28,266-square-foot expansion at its manufacturing site in Lessines, Belgium. That expansion is planned to be at some point this year.

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