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At the BIO International Convention 2025 in Boston, King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre (KFSHRC) and Germfree Laboratories, LLC have announced a strategic partnership to develop Saudi Arabia's first fully integrated, modular Advanced Therapy Medicinal Product (ATMP) Manufacturing Campus.
The new facility will be located at KFSHRC's main campus in Riyadh and will serve as a critical milestone in advancing Vision 2030 and the National Biotechnology Strategy, two national initiatives aimed at transforming the Kingdom into a global hub for life sciences, biomanufacturing, and to become a global biotech hub by 2040.
Under the terms of a signed Letter of Intent, the turnkey project will fast-track the Kingdom's ability to manufacture cell and gene therapies (CGTs) locally, host international clinical trials, and attract leading pharmaceutical partnerships and scientific talent from around the world.
This project directly supports Saudi Arabia's National Biotechnology Strategy, launched to localise vaccine and therapeutic production, develop sovereign biomanufacturing capabilities, and establish the Kingdom as a global biotechnology leader by 2040.
The ATMP Manufacturing Campus will be delivered as a fully CGMP-compliant, off-site built, modular solution, developed in strategic phases to support immediate clinical impact and long-term growth.
The project will begin with the deployment of Germfree's BioGO® Box single-module cleanroom solution, enabling early operator training, tech transfer, and R&D activities.
In parallel, a newly constructed facility will be built centrally on the KFSHRC campus to house prefabricated modular cleanroom clusters, providing 16 production suites, each designed for multi-modal CGT production supporting both clinical and commercial-scale manufacturing. Full operational readiness will be reached just 18 months after contract signing, roughly half the timeline of a conventional stick-built facility of comparable scope.
