GE Healthcare has announced plans to set up four “prefab” biologic “KUBio” factories, in BioPark Cork, Ireland.

"This important investment by GE is a significant win for industry in the Cork region and an endorsement of Cork as the leading location for such investment," Mayor of Co. Cork, Councillor Seamus McGrath told the Irish Examiner.

The facility is slated to create 500 permanent jobs. Construction will employ and estimated 800 people as well.

“Pharma companies worldwide are racing to respond to patient needs with new life-changing biological medicines, and GE is investing in technology and service solutions, as well as industry skills and expertise, to enable them to make and get their products to market more quickly,” Kieran Murphy, CEO of GE Healthcare Life Sciences, said in a statement. “We are delighted to be investing once again in Ireland, where we have ourselves a long history of manufacturing our own medical imaging products.”

Plans call for construction to start in 2017.

"Ireland is a real hub for biopharmaceuticals, so it's logical to do it there," Murphy told Ireland's RTE News, adding that it's one of the key places people are going in the world, along with Singapore, Korea and China.

The overall campus will be GE managed and house four factories owned by biopharma firms.

In addition, the National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT) is going to create an NIBRT-GE Single-use Centre of Excellence at NIBRT’s Dublin facility, at which it hopes to train up to 1,500 bioprocessing professionals annually on next-generation biologic manufacturing technologies.

“NIBRT is delighted to partner with GE on the next generation of bioprocessing equipment,” stated Dominic Carolan, CEO of NIBRT, adding that speeding up the use of new technologies in biopharma will help cut costs and boost access to “these valuable therapies.”

Global demand for such medicines is creating increased production needs. The GE KUBio modules let a pharma company spin-up biologics production and bring new medicines to market more quickly, and are 25 to 50 percent cheaper to run, according to the release. The facility build time is also cut from three years to about 18 months.

The first KUBio prefab, for JHL Biotech in China, recently started operations. Pfizer also has a KUBio being put together in that country, according to the Economic Times of India. These plants allow the production of lower cost versions of biotech drugs, such as AbbVie's Humira or Roche's Herceptin.

Biopharma is a big player in the Irish economy – over 28,000 people currently work in biopharma and 6,000 of those work in biologics, according to Minister Mitchell O’Connor.

Ireland's 12.5 percent corporate tax rate has maintained the allure to drug companies to establish themselves in the republic, according to Fortune. Nine of the top 10 pharmaceutical firms have an international base there, it advised.

The move is seen as a “win” for the republic by semi-state-promotion agency IDA Ireland's CEO, Martin Shanahan, according to the Irish Times. He noted that “The biopharmaceutical manufacturing campus will greatly assist IDA Ireland in winning additional bio-manufacturing investments by acting as a catalyst to attract new innovator drug companies and to transition and grow existing operations.”

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