Capacity to spare: US has manufacturing firepower to crank out more essential medicines, researchers say

By Fraiser Kansteiner, The Fierce Pharma

The U.S.' “onshoring” initiative that kicked off during the Trump administration at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic has been carried forward by President Joe Biden, who recently committed $2 billion in a bid to rejuvenate the U.S.’s biotech and biomanufacturing base.

Now, as the nation works to take drug manufacturing back into its own hands, one group of researchers suggests the country already has production capacity to spare. 

Among a cluster of 37 U.S.-based generic pharmaceutical manufacturing sites, just two sites were working at or near full capacity during May and June, according to a new study from the Washington University in St. Louis’ Center for Analytics and Business Insights (CABI). Further, nearly 30% of the facilities CABI polled were either idled (5.4%) or were utilizing 50% or less of their manufacturing capacity (24.3%).

The team conducted its survey by contacting 18 generic drug manufacturers in the U.S.

during May and June. Thirteen companies responded to the poll.

Were the U.S. generic sites running at maximum capacity, the researchers estimate the factories could crank out nearly 30 billion additional doses of essential drugs “without the expense and effort of building new manufacturing plants,” Washington University in St. Louis explained in a release.

The study authors recommend that the idle sites be repurposed to

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