In eight years, Biose Industrie will have quadrupled its production capacity, from 8,000 liters in 2020 to 32,000 liters of fermentation volume within four years. After an initial fund-raising round of 40 million euros, the CDMO raised a second round in mid-2023. Expansion work has begun in Aurillac. By 2028, the building will have grown from 15,000 m² to around 25,000 m².
Thanks to the 2020 fund-raising, four new production units have been commissioned (three active ingredient lines, ranging from 150 to 5,000 liters, and a clinical chemical production unit) and existing industrial areas redeveloped. New funding of 80 million euros will enable the opening of two additional active substance units (one 5000-liter unit and one unit of 10,000 liters or more).
More than 200 new hires are also planned, bringing the total number of employees to 500. “There are times when we’re recruiting two new employees a week,” says Biose Industrie president Adrien Nivoliez.
Today, Biose mainly manufactures drugs for clinical trials, but with several of its customers having obtained the green light from health agencies (FDA, EMA, etc.) to move on to phase III, several solutions currently produced by the CDMO will be marketed on a large scale.
“With this expansion, we’ll be demonstrating that we’ve made the transition from a CMO to a CDMO with large-scale manufacturing, producing several initial products that will go straight to the world market. We are a true industrial start-up, with the capacity to structure a project industrially and manage the associated pharmaceutical industrialization work. Our aim is to support our customers’ development and provide them with the products they need in the quantities and timescales they require“, Adrien Nivoliez, President of Biose Industrie.
Biose was founded in 1951, in the Cantal region of France, after developing a bacterial-based anti-diarrhea drug, Lenia, which is still marketed today. In 2017, the company made a decisive shift from CDO to CDMO. It has succeeded in building a solid technological platform and has no plans to turn back. “We are service providers and will remain so, we don’t want to compete with our customers,” explains the CEO.
A leader in the production of drugs from bacteria, Biose Industrie accounts for a very significant proportion of worldwide production. 100 million capsules and 10 million sachets leave the Aurillac laboratories every year. France accounts for just 10% of the company’s sales, Asia for 25%, the United States for 50% and Europe for the rest. As a result, an R&D facility was opened in Boston in the summer of 2023, thanks to the funds raised in 2020.
The 230 pharmaceutical companies currently identified on this market, some of which use Biose Industrie’s services, use these microbiota-based products for the treatment or prevention of intestinal inflammation, in oncology (as a companion, to boost the efficacy of anti-cancer treatments) and in the field of immunology (food allergies, environment, etc.). Indirectly, the investments made by the company “aim to create new therapeutic modalities that will enable us to achieve superior or new efficacy in pathologies that are not currently treated“, concludes the CEO.
