Cleanrooms for pharmaceutical and biotech companies

G-CON at a glance

G-CON Manufacturing designs, builds and installs prefabricated cleanrooms, called PODs®, for pharmaceutical and biotech companies. G-CON’s unique cleanroom solutions provide bioprocessing capacity for a variety of uses, from laboratory environments to personalized medicine and commercial production process platforms. G-CON’s POD product is differentiated by being a “plug-and-play”, fully functional, cleanroom with lower total cost of ownership, faster delivery times and more consistent quality.

Year acquired

2020

Sector

Prefabricated cleanrooms for biotech

Revenue

EUR 64 m

Location

United States

Employees

289

Investment themes

Changing Demographics

Key developments in 2021

G-CON had a year of strong growth with revenues increasing by 128% to $86m. The company played an important role in providing a large scale mRNA facilities for COVID-19 vaccines when speed of delivery and quality were the most critical requirements and reinforced its market positioning as an innovative bioprocessing capacity provider. To gear up for future growth, the company started building up a commercial and engineering team to better cater the Europe market and initiated expansion of its facility in College Station, Texas. Furthermore, the company launched six standard PODs, which can be sold from inventory or built and supplied in 3 months.


Impact dimensions

The challenges we face

As the biopharma market evolves towards new therapeutic modalities, the traditional drug manufacturing process and facilities require rethinking. Conventional manufacturing capacity design and implementation are time and resource consuming, unreliable in delivery time and cost budgets and can only be scaled while interrupting existing processes. Depending on the scope of the facility, planning can take 1 - 3 years, before construction can happen.

What is the outcome?

G-CON contributes to fulfilling pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical capacity needs, while embracing new therapeutic trends and being a driver for innovation to fulfill the unique processing needs within cell and gene therapies. Pre-fabricated and -qualified cleanroom infrastructures reduce lengthy design phases, allow a much faster build, reduce the project management burden and guarantee functionality post-installation. G-CON infrastructures can be repurposed once a product lifecycle runs out or repositioned if needed, which creates flexibility and further lowers cost.

Who are the stakeholders?

Key stakeholders range from large biopharmaceutical, startup and research-organizations to CDMO companies. The ultimate beneficiary of the drug development and manufacturing conducted by direct customers are patients and society at large, that get access to better treatment faster and more affordably.

How big is the effect, and does it last?

The biopharma market has a constant and long term need for PODs to deliver their lifesaving services. New facility designs and builds are needed for cell and gene therapies. Traditional large volume facilities cannot accommodate these processes.

If G-CON didn’t exist...

Without G-CON’s cleanroom designs and offsite manufacturing, bioprocessing capacity expansion would be much slower, more costly, and more disruptive, and often with lower quality. This would result in delays in patients getting treatments and introduction of new therapies to the patient base.

Impact risk: what can go wrong?

If G-CON does not maintain its ability for swift delivery and high quality, its customers are likely to turn to other type of cleanroom solutions, which would result in slower manufacturing capacity built-up for critical drugs and vaccines.

SDG alignment

SDG 3
SDG 9

Impact KPIs

Total time saved to launch production (in months)

2021:
+0%
56
2020:
43
2019:
33

Total cleanroom space created (in SQM)

2021:
+0%
5 839
2020:
3 430
2019:
1 996