Biomanufacturer planning $150M Boxborough facility

Photo | Courtesy | Arranta Bio Arranta Bio's planned Boxborough biomanufacturing facility

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By Grant Welker

Arranta Bio, a microbiome contract development and manufacturing organization, is planning a $150-million facility in Boxborough to drastically increase its capacity beyond its sites in Watertown and Florida.

Arranta has begun work on the first phase of what will be a 130,000-square-foot biomanufacturing facility, a space so large it exceeds that of its two existing facilities combined. The company said it plans to employ more than 250 workers at the facility, with completion of the first phase set for early 2022.

As a so-called CDMO, Watertown-based Arranta provides manufacturing space for drug, life science or other products for clients. Before the Boxborough announcement, it had already invested more than $100 million last year to expand its supply capacity in helping microbiome firms. About 400 companies are actively exploring the links between diseases and the microbiome — bacteria and viruses inside the body – in order to identify therapeutic targets, Arranta said.

Arranta's Boxborough plans are the latest sign of quickly expanding biomanufacturing uses on the north and west outer stretches of Greater Boston, which in many cases are meant to complement thriving life science companies based in places like Boston and Cambridge.

Another CDMO, the German firm Vibalogics, announced last November it'll build a very similar sized facility in Boxborough: a $150-million building spanning 110,000 square feet. Vibalogics, which said it hoped to begin operations in the second half of this year, was selected last May by Janssen Pharmaceutical Cos., a Johnson & Johnson company, as one of its manufacturing partners for its investigational coronavirus vaccine.

Nearby in Devens, pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb is expanding its facility by 244,000 square feet to manufacture a cell therapy for lymphoma patients that has achieved U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. Boston development firm King Street Properties is planning a $500-million life sciences complex that would span 700,00 square feet and is aimed at helping Boston-area life sciences companies find accessible space for manufacturing.

In March, a Cambridge firm developing fusion energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, said it'll build a $300-million, 47-acre site in Devens to test fusion energy to prove that fusion can work as a power source. That announcement came a few weeks after Bio-Techne, a biotechnology company specializing in tools for life science research, said it had completed a 27,000-square-foot addition to its Devens building.