The price of building - or not

Building a full-scale commercial facility is not cheap. Rolf Werner, market director for biopharmaceuticals at Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH (Ingelheim, Germany), estimates that it costs $50 million to build a 15,000-liter bioreactor, including downstream processing and quality control. Thus, a six-reactor plant would cost about $300 million.

However, building a plant with only two 15,000-liter reactors would raise the price per reactor above $50 million, because the accompanying infrastructure such as steam generation, air generation, QA and QC still would be required. "Because one processing area serves two bioreactors, you get more economies of scale with a greater number of bioreactors," said Werner...