Shortly after finalizing two deals worth $897 million with Pfizer, Samsung Biologics has expanded its partnership with Novartis, adding hundreds of millions of dollars to its collaboration fund.
In a regulatory filing on Monday, Samsung Bio announced a $390.9 million agreement to support the manufacturing of Novartis drugs. This new production deal builds upon a previous Samsung-Novartis collaboration valued at $81 million in June 2022.
Last week, Samsung Bio also revealed that Pfizer had contributed an additional $486 million to two biosimilar production agreements established earlier in 2023. In June, the two companies signed a contract for the Korean contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) to produce biosimilar drugs in the fields of immunology, oncology, and inflammation.
According to a regulatory filing in March, the companies entered into a deal worth $193 million.
Although the Novartis agreement falls short of the June Pfizer deal, it now stands as Samsung’s second-largest production partnership, surpassing a $360 million deal with AstraZeneca.
The specific Novartis drugs that Samsung Bio will manufacture have not been disclosed at this time.
In 2023 alone, Samsung has reportedly secured a total of $1.7 billion in manufacturing orders, as reported by Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.
In addition to its collaborations with major pharmaceutical companies, Samsung Bio has been aggressively expanding its operations in recent years through continuous capacity expansion initiatives.
In March, the Korean manufacturing giant announced plans to begin construction of its Plant 5 in the first half of 2023, with operations expected to commence in 2025.
Samsung is investing 1.9 trillion South Korean won ($1.46 billion) into the project, which will add 180,000 liters of capacity to the Incheon complex, bringing the total capacity to 784,000 liters, the highest at a single site in the industry.
