Sartorius Group, a global pharma supplier and provider of laboratory equipment, has officially opened a €16m filter and aseptic bag production facility in Yauco, Puerto Rico.
The firm has upgraded and extended the filter plant at the site and has relocated aseptic bag manufacture from Concord, California to Puerto Rico.
It has taken almost 12 months to construct the new 5,000m2 building, which provides space for two new cleanrooms for filter and bag manufacture, labs and offices. By the end of the year, bag manufacturing will be moved from Concord to Yauco and the Concord site will close.
Sartorius says it has extended the plant in response to growing demand for single-use products. Filters are used in the biopharmaceutical industry to sterile-filter biopharmaceuticals or to obtain active pharmaceutical ingredients from liquids.
Single-use bags are employed as flexible containers for preparing nutrients, installed in single-use bioreactors, or used for transporting and storing biological active ingredients.
The firm says both types of product are increasingly being requested as combined, sterile-packaged and ready-to-connect single-use assemblies.
