$2B Life Science Project Lands 1st Tenant

FUJIFILM Diosynth officials recently attended the Holly Springs facility’s site unveiling. Image courtesy of FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies

FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies has signed Johnson & Johnson‘s Janssen Supply Group as the first tenant at its $2 billion biopharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Holly Springs, N.C., a 1 million-square-foot development slated for completion in 2025. The location will support Janssen’s clinical and commercial manufacturing pipeline.

FUJIFILM Diosynth announced the plans for the Holly Springs facility in January 2021 and broke ground on the project same year in October, partnering with the local government, the chamber of commerce and academia. The site will create 725 manufacturing jobs in North Carolina by the end of 2028.

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FUJIFILM launched a similar project in the nearby Research Triangle Park in late 2022. The company invested $188 million for the development of a 250,000-square-foot cell culture media manufacturing facility which will support the cGMP manufacturing of dry powder and liquid media.

The largest cell culture CDMO facility in North America

Upon completion, the facility will include two large-scale manufacturing sites with 4 x 20,000 L bioreactors each; development plans also include the possibility for expansion with additional 24 x 20,000 L bioreactors. Services provided will feature drug substance manufacturing, automated fill-finish and assembly, packaging and labeling.

The superplant is also slated to include sustainability features. Its design targets 100 percent clean energy utilization, together with implementation of cutting edge waste disposal and recycling, among others.

To become the largest cell culture CDMO facility in North America, the superplant is taking shape at 11751 New Hill Road in the Triangle region, 20 miles from downtown Raleigh, N.C. The location is also adjacent to a 2 million-square-foot life science campus developed by Crescent Communities and Nuveen Real Estate.

Raleigh-Durham’s life science real estate sector ended the second quarter of 2023 with a vacancy rate of 22.8 percent, a 40-basis-point increase quarter-over-quarter, according to a Cushman & Wakefield report. Q2 was also the fifth consecutive quarter in which the market registered a rise in rental rates. The metro had 2.2 million square feet under construction, with 467,361 square feet completed by the end of the second quarter.