Roche to Sell Genentech's Vacaville Bio-Manufacturing Plant

Swiss pharma giant Roche, the parent company of gene therapy pioneer Genentech, announced this week that it is divesting Genentech’s 427K SF facility in Vacaville, the largest bio-manufacturing plant in the US.

Roche said it hopes to find a “suitable buyer” for the manufacturing site but said the decision would have no immediate effect on employees or operations at the Vacaville facility, according to a report in the San Francisco Business Times.

“We aim to find a buyer who shares our values and respects the contributions and expertise of our colleagues at the facility,” Susanne Hundsbaek-Pederson, global head of pharma technical operations for Roche, said in a statement.

Roche characterized the decision to divest the plant as part of a long-term strategy to “evolve manufacturing capabilities.”

Roche said the Vacaville facility is now one of the oldest in Roche’s production network, specializing in large-scale production of injected antibody drugs the Swiss company said would now be shifted to a newer facility.

The bio-manufacturing plant in Vacaville, which opened in 2000, was the key to South San Francisco-based Genentech’s surge into a leadership position in the emerging field of genomics.

The plant launched the production of blockbuster cancer-fighting monoclonal antibody drugs Herceptin, or trastuzumab, and then Avastin, also known as bevicizumab. Both drugs have showed promise in clinical trials in shrinking tumors in people with breast cancer and other types of cancer.

The facility, which is about 50 miles northeast of San Francisco, also manufacturers the arthritis and Covid-19 drug Actemra, as well as Rituxan, Perjeta, Ocrevus and Vabysmo.

The engine of the manufacturing of new treatments at the Vacaville plant has been a 25,000-liter bioreactor, one of the largest in the world. However, bio-manufacturing is moving toward rapidly emerging new therapies that rely less on huge bioreactors to produce huge quantities of what are known as “pharmaceutical proteins” made from the cells of mammals.

The newer therapies include cell therapies and cancer vaccines that will be tailored to a person’s DNA.

Genentech building an 84K SF manufacturing facility in Oceanside in SoCal, where it operates seven buildings encompassing 575K SF.

Vacaville has been able to develop one of the leading US hubs for bio-manufacturing, using the Genentech plant as an anchor to attract other biotech leaders to an area between I-80 and I-505 south of the Genentech facility.

Companies that have flocked to Vacaville include Agenus Bio, Polaris Pharmaceuticals and Mettler-Toledo Rainin LLC. Transwestern Ventures received entitlements last year for its Axiom Point bio-manufacturing campus.

The acquisition of Genentech in 2009 by Roche, then known as Hoffman-La Roche, dealt a crippling blow to New Jersey’s ambitions to unseat California as the state with the largest biotech/pharma industry when Roche decided to shutter its production facility in Nutley, NJ—then the largest employer in Bergen County—instead of relocating Genentech to NJ.

The Nutley plant, which also featured a bio-reactor, was the production site for the drugs Valium and Librium, Roche’s two most successful patents.