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To House ThermoFisher’ s First Clinical Trial Supplies Facility In Asia Ahmedabad: When the world’s leading R&D equipment maker, supplier and services provider — ThermoFisher Scientific Inc — decided to set up Asia’s first clinical trial supplies manufacturing and distribution plant, it turned to Ahmedabad.

The $11-billion US giant chose Ahmedabad after a rigorous analysis of multiple pharma and biotech SEZs. “We considered six other locations including Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune and Mohali,” says Fisher BioPhar ma Services India Pvt Ltd president and managing director Ram Gupta. The company has acquired 15 acres at Zydus Cadila’s Pharmez at Matoda and is putting up a 1.5 lakh sq ft facility to cater to global markets. In the first phase it is injecting $17 million in the greenfield facility that will commence production in the third week of November. Plans are afoot to invest another $50-odd milllion over the next five years in quadrupling capacities.
Incidentally, the Ahmedabad facility is ThermoFisher’ s sixth clinial trial supplies facility and the first of its kind in Asia. The US company has three such plants in US and one each in UK and Switzerland. With over 30,000 employees, the NYSE-listed ThermoFisher caters to nearly 3.5 lakh customers in the pharma and biotech space across 150 countries.
“With pharma and biotech MNCs increasingly looking at India as a human clinical trials destination for new drugs, there was tremendous pressure from clients to set up base in the shortest possible time and Ahmedabad was the only city with completely approved pharma SEZs,” explains Gupta.
What also swung things in Ahmedabad’s favour was the good manpower availability, superior quality of life and affordable living. “Someone renting a 2BHK apartment in Mumbai or Bangalore can in the same budget easily get a 4BHK apartment or bungalow with a bit of greenery thrown in here,” he says.
“Being a pharma and CRO hub, manpower with good technical capabilities at the middle level is easily available here. It’s also easier to move top talent from cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad here because of the quality of life,” he adds.