This week GE Healthcare and JHL Biotech, a biopharma startup, announced that the world’s toughest diseases had met their match with the opening of the world’s first modular biopharmaceutical manufacturing facility based on single-use technology in Wuhan, China. Here’s a look at how they did it.

Step 1:  Have a vision

To make high-quality biopharmaceuticals affordable and accessible to all patients. That’s where JHL Biotech began.

Then find an innovative solution that will let you do that. That’s where KUBio, GE Healthcare’s solution, came in.

Step 2: Each piece matters

Design each of the puzzle pieces that will make up the “factory in a box.” For each of these modules, plan for the specific materials needed for the factory room it will ultimately become in the KUBio, including installing electrical, water, and ventilation equipment.

The KUBio installed for JHL Biotech was made of 62 prefabricated modules. The prefab equipment was manufactured and tested at GE before shipping, while JHL prepared the Wuhan site for their arrival.

Step 3: Walls aboard

Set sail alongside your fully designed prefabricated modules that will soon become your factory’s floor, ceiling, walls and all.

KUBio – including the 62 prefabricated modules and 250 pieces called FlexFactory components that would become the biomanufacturing platform – traveled by boat for 2 months from three manufacturing facilities in Germany, Sweden, and the US to its home in Wuhan, China.

Step 4: Open the box

Play “factory in a box”: Unpack and assemble your prefabricated modules into a full-fledged factory, like taking out the pieces of a puzzle from a box and putting them together.

In Wuhan, GE unpacked and assembled the 62 modules into a facility. In just eight days.

Step 5: Flex Your (Factory) Muscles

Equip your factory with its inner machinery – bioreactor and all – to make it a biopharma facility.

While the KUBio modules were en route to China, 250 pieces of FlexFactory components were manufactured, tested, and shipped.

Step 6: Make it official

Bring in the experts to validate the site.

For JHL Biotech’s site, GE’s experienced team validated the equipment and trained staff to maximize production.

Step 7: Fight the toughest diseases

Produce biologics that will fight cancer, diabetes and the world’s toughest diseases. More accessible. For more people. Faster.

JHL Biotech will open for production using KUBio to produce biologics that will achieve their vision of making high-quality biopharmaceuticals more affordable and accessible in China.

Done.

More on KUBio:

World’s Largest Single-Use Biopharmaceutical Factory Made in Germany, Bound for China

Turnkey Pharma: The Next Phase of #KUBio in China

Toughest Diseases in the World Meet Their Match: A Factory in a Box