AGC Biologics adds two 5,000 L DynaDrive bioreactors to Yokohama site

AGC Biologics will install two Thermo Scientific DynaDrive 5,000 L single-use bioreactors at the new facility it is building in Yokohama, the company announced on April 7, 2025. Four Cytiva 2,000 L bioreactors will go in alongside them, adding 18,000 L of single-use culture capacity.

AGC Biologics is the biopharmaceutical CDMO owned by AGC, the Japanese glass maker formerly called Asahi Glass. It has expanded to Denmark, Italy, the United States and Germany, but it has had no commercial-scale mammalian cell culture capacity in Japan. The Yokohama investment is ¥50 billion (US$325 million). The four-story building has 20,000 m² of floor space. Construction began in January 2024, completion is planned for December 2026, and GMP manufacturing is scheduled to start in 2027. The site will make mammalian-derived protein drugs, cell therapies and mRNA.

Customers are signing on before the building is finished. On July 28, 2026, AGC Biologics announced that it had won a commercial manufacturing contract for the Yokohama site, which the company said is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

For years 2,000 L was treated as the practical ceiling for single-use bioreactors. Above that, bag strength, impeller design and oxygen supply became hard to manage. Choosing two 5,000 L units shows that for part of commercial antibody production, the line between single-use and stainless steel has moved. Still, 18,000 L of single-use capacity is not the same as 18,000 L in stainless steel. Bags are replaced every batch, which saves cleaning and sterilization time but ties the process to the shape of each vessel.

The two suppliers' vessels also mix differently. The DynaDrive drives its impeller from a motor coupled directly at the bottom, while the Cytiva Xcellerex XDR is built another way. When a process moves from one vessel type to the other, agitation conditions will have to be worked out again. Matching power input per unit volume does not guarantee the same shear if the flow pattern is different.

How the capacity will be split among modalities once the plant runs has not been disclosed. For a sponsor, the useful number is not tank size but how much of it is still open in 2027.