A new global site selection study has been released by The Boyd Company, Inc. The report compares the cost of operating a biomanufacturing plant in a series of 25 top U.S. and off-shore hubs of the biopharma industry. Operating costs are scaled to a hypothetical 300,000 sq. ft. biologics production plant employing 300 workers. The analysis includes all major geographically-variable cost factors critical to the corporate site selection process for new biomanufacturing operations.

The Boyd study found Copenhagen, Denmark, to be the most costly city to operate at $58.7 million per year and Bangalore, India, to be the least costly site at $13.9 million. Among the U.S. biopharma hubs, annual costs range from a high of $55.4 million in New York, NY, to a low of $37.2 in Raleigh/Durham, NC.
 
U.S. and global biomanufacturing locations surveyed by Boyd were selected based on their being current or emerging biopharma hubs. Criteria included: the size and growth of local life sciences employment, the inventory of lab space, NIH funding, the presence of academic and medical research institutions and the depth of their overall high tech workforce.
 
Off-shore locations were chosen based on their housing major operations of global biopharma players: Copenhagen (Novo Nordisk), Paris (Sanofi), Frankfurt (Merck), Dublin (Allergan), Zurich/Basel (Biogen), London (GlaxoSmithKline), Melbourne (Mayne Pharma), Bangalore (Bal Pharma), Tel Aviv/Petah Tikva (Teva), Tokyo (Otsuka) and Singapore (Bestar).
 

The report also goes on to detail the growing pressures for price controls on prescription drugs along with tax, trade and regulatory uncertainties associated with the 2020 presidential election, all of which are causing a heightened focus on operating cost structures and efficiencies within the biopharma industry.

According to the report, many pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies are concluding that improving the bottom line on the cost side of the ledger will be far easier than on the revenue side in 2020 and beyond. Site selection planning on where to locate new biomanufacturing facilities, likewise, is focusing heavily on comparative economics.

An example of itemized annual operating costs are detailed in the following table for high and low-cost biopharma hubs.

 
For more information about the Boyd report, click here.