When President Trump signed an executive order on May 5, 2025, to “facilitate the restoration of a robust domestic manufacturing base for prescription drugs, including key ingredients and materials necessary to manufacture prescription drugs,” it made me wonder: Where is bioprocessing taking place around the world and what can we learn from ongoing trends?
Today, the United States is a crucial force in bioprocessing. Still, picking one country as the top bioprocessor gets into the weeds of the analysis, because bioprocessing can be defined in different ways. A market study produced by Grand View Research, though, reported that North America accounted for 38% of global bioprocessing revenue in 2024, and most of that came from the United States.
For 2025–2030, though, Grand View’s study forecasts that the “Asia Pacific large- and small-scale bioprocessing market is anticipated to grow at the fastest [compound annual growth rate] of 15.8% over the forecast period.”
In 2024, China created most of the bioprocessing market in the Asia Pacific. “China is transitioning from generics to innovative products, with a focus on biologics,” the Grand View study noted. “This shift positions China as a significant player in global bioprocessing.”
This should not surprise me. In 2018, I read Factfulness by the late Hans Rosling and his son and daughter-in-law—Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, respectively—and these authors wrote: “In sales and marketing, if you run a big business in Europe or the United States, you and your employees need to understand that the world market of the future will be growing primarily in Asia and Africa, not at home.” For biotherapeutics, this transition could go beyond just sales and marketing to bioprocessing itself.
So, Asia’s bioprocessing market is growing, which reflects the prediction from Rosling and his colleagues. What about Africa? Like Asia, Africa is a lot of ground to cover, but here’s one example. In June 2024, the data and content company RWS reported: “The life sciences market in Africa is undergoing rapid growth, emerging as a pivotal contributor to the global healthcare landscape,” and this “market is poised to become the second largest worldwide after the United States by 2030, indicative of its rapid expansion and increasing significance.” Part of that expansion, according to RWS, will come from governments in Africa “focusing on pharmaceutical localization to overcome global supply chain disruptions and strengthen domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing.”
Where bioprocessing is going globally is a big question—as big as the Earth—and a thorough analysis would take more than a few hundred words. Sometimes, though, big concepts can be distilled into short statements. One that I remember came during my first semester of college at the University of Rochester in upstate New York in the Fall of 1978. To kick off a class in macroeconomics, the first thing that the professor said was: “It’s a world economy.” That was true nearly 50 years ago, probably even farther back than that, and it’s the case today. If people learned just one thing from the COVID-19 pandemic, the supply-chain issues alone should have cemented the concept of a world economy in people’s heads.
The take-home message is this: the Trump administration can want more pharmaceutical manufacturing, including bioprocessing, in the United States, but it will take much more than wishing for it—or “ordering” it—to make that happen.
The post Where is Bioprocessing Going Globally? appeared first on GEN - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
Today, the United States is a crucial force in bioprocessing. Still, picking one country as the top bioprocessor gets into the weeds of the analysis, because bioprocessing can be defined in different ways. A market study produced by Grand View Research, though, reported that North America accounted for 38% of global bioprocessing revenue in 2024, and most of that came from the United States.
For 2025–2030, though, Grand View’s study forecasts that the “Asia Pacific large- and small-scale bioprocessing market is anticipated to grow at the fastest [compound annual growth rate] of 15.8% over the forecast period.”
In 2024, China created most of the bioprocessing market in the Asia Pacific. “China is transitioning from generics to innovative products, with a focus on biologics,” the Grand View study noted. “This shift positions China as a significant player in global bioprocessing.”
This should not surprise me. In 2018, I read Factfulness by the late Hans Rosling and his son and daughter-in-law—Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, respectively—and these authors wrote: “In sales and marketing, if you run a big business in Europe or the United States, you and your employees need to understand that the world market of the future will be growing primarily in Asia and Africa, not at home.” For biotherapeutics, this transition could go beyond just sales and marketing to bioprocessing itself.
So, Asia’s bioprocessing market is growing, which reflects the prediction from Rosling and his colleagues. What about Africa? Like Asia, Africa is a lot of ground to cover, but here’s one example. In June 2024, the data and content company RWS reported: “The life sciences market in Africa is undergoing rapid growth, emerging as a pivotal contributor to the global healthcare landscape,” and this “market is poised to become the second largest worldwide after the United States by 2030, indicative of its rapid expansion and increasing significance.” Part of that expansion, according to RWS, will come from governments in Africa “focusing on pharmaceutical localization to overcome global supply chain disruptions and strengthen domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing.”
Where bioprocessing is going globally is a big question—as big as the Earth—and a thorough analysis would take more than a few hundred words. Sometimes, though, big concepts can be distilled into short statements. One that I remember came during my first semester of college at the University of Rochester in upstate New York in the Fall of 1978. To kick off a class in macroeconomics, the first thing that the professor said was: “It’s a world economy.” That was true nearly 50 years ago, probably even farther back than that, and it’s the case today. If people learned just one thing from the COVID-19 pandemic, the supply-chain issues alone should have cemented the concept of a world economy in people’s heads.
The take-home message is this: the Trump administration can want more pharmaceutical manufacturing, including bioprocessing, in the United States, but it will take much more than wishing for it—or “ordering” it—to make that happen.
The post Where is Bioprocessing Going Globally? appeared first on GEN - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.