Avantor, a leading B2B provider of mission-critical products and services in biopharma and healthcare among others, announced that it plans to continue expanding its customer network in China in the coming two years to meet the growing demands in the market.

The United States-based company said it currently engages more than 100 biopharma customers through its Shanghai-based Innovation and Customer Support Center and many more through its technical and commercial teams, and this has helped the enterprise grow more than 100 percent year-on-year in China in recent years.

Janny Wang, general manager of Avantor China, said in an interview with China Daily on Sunday that China will continue to be a key market for the company, which has had a presence in the country for 12 years. The company will also expand its local manufacturing capacities, increase its employee base, and introduce unique solutions to meet the needs of Chinese consumers.

"We are also aiming to bring in more investments for local manufacturing capabilities and drive innovation to meet the requirements of the Chinese life sciences market. We've already begun the process to align our global systems, processes, and capabilities to offer world-class solutions to customers working on all bioproduction platforms, including monoclonal antibodies, cell and gene therapies, and mRNA, and supports both therapy and vaccine manufacturing including COVID-19 in China," Wang added.

Narayana Rao Rapolu, vice-president of Avantor's biopharma business in Asia, Middle East, and Africa, said that China is a major COVID-19 vaccine supplier, and that the company has throughout the pandemic supported its customers in improving the speed of emergency response through a range of products related to COVID-19 detection, safety and treatment.

"We have worked closely with COVID-19 vaccine and therapy developers in China and prioritized supplies of mission-critical process chemicals, raw materials and single use consumables going into research and development as well as manufacturing to enable the faster development and supply of COVID-19 vaccines and therapies to patients in China and globally," Rapolu said.

He noted that the company has witnessed how quickly COVID-19 vaccines have been developed because of the use of single-use solutions in the industry.

"We expanded our global single-use capacity with the acquisition of the Chinese biopharmaceutical material manufacturer RIM Bio, which has a manufacturing plant in Changzhou city, Jiangsu province. Such efforts now provide us with a China-for-China offering to our customers here," Rapolu said.

Avantor's technologies and quality standards also helped Chinese COVID-19 vaccines and drug companies go global, said Rapolu.

"We work on qualifying them for various pharmacopeias across the globe, including those in China, US, Europe, Japan, and the United Kingdom," he said.

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