Avantor Presents Completed Hydration Expansion at DCAT Week 2025

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On March 17, 2025, Avantor’s head of the company’s Scientific Advisory Board, Ger Brophy, presented a look at Avantor’s completed manufacturing site in Gliwice, Poland at Drug, Chemical & Associated Technologies Association (DCAT) Week 2025, which is taking place from March 17–20 in New York City.

The new facility quadruples capacity at the site and provides manufacturing, formulation, and filling United States Pharmacopeia (USP) purified water and water for injection (WFI)-based hydration solutions. The solutions assist with buffer preparations, cell culture media, clean-in-process, and formulation processes, according to the company.

"This latest investment strengthens our global manufacturing network, building important capacity and bringing our operations closer to customers," said Benoit Gourdier, EVP of Avantor's Bioscience Production Segment, in a press release (1). "It ensures a dependable supply of high-quality products while strengthening our role as a trusted partner, working alongside biopharma manufacturers to produce life changing therapies."

The new expansion in Poland adds to other recent expansions the company has made, including expanded capacity at its Aurora, Ohio site and a new production facility in Phillipsburg, NJ, which doubled the company’s output of synthesized salts. “These investments improve Avantor's global production efficiency, optimize supply chain operations and strengthen the availability of raw materials for biopharma applications to customers worldwide,” the company stated in the press release.

The company also expanded its research and innovation capabilities with the opening of its new 60,000-sq.-ft. Bridgewater Innovation Center in New Jersey, which doubled its original lab and pilot plant capacity (2). The center houses spaces for upstream and downstream process development, dedicated analytical testing labs, and a viral vector laboratory. Additionally, the center includes an expanded pilot plant that supports scale-up simulations, which is intended to enable rapid customization across the entire bioprocessing workflow. The center will optimize and accelerate biomanufacturing processes at scale and will allow for faster problem solving, streamlined knowledge exchange, and strategic co-innovation, according to the company.

“Our new Bridgewater Innovation Center is twice the size of our previous facility and adds capacity, talent, and capabilities to support the growing demands for monoclonal antibodies [mAbs], cell and gene therapy [CGT], and mRNA [messenger RNA] workflows,” said Michael Stubblefield, president and CEO of Avantor, in a press release at the time of the announcement. “Working side-by-side with customers in our network of innovation centers across the globe enables us to power science at every step to deliver life-changing therapies faster and more cost effectively.”

Avantor’s Benoit Gourdier, executive vice-president and head, Bioscience Production Segment, and Nandu Deorkar, senior vice-president, Bioscience Production Research & Development, spoke with BioPharm International^® in November 2024 about the new center, innovation in biopharma, and the shift to personalized medicine (3).

References

1. Avantor Provides First Look at Recently Completed Hydration Expansion at DCAT Week 2025. Press Release. March 17, 2025.
2. Mirasol, F. Avantor Launches New Innovation Center in New Jersey to Tackle Challenges in Life Sciences. BioPharmInternational.com. Nov. 14, 2024.
3. Mirasol, F. Avantor Geared for Biopharma Industry’s Future with Next-Generation Biotherapeutics. BioPharmInternational.com, Nov. 14, 2024.