FILE PHOTO: A view of the skyline in Singapore, January 27, 2023. REUTERS/Caroline Chia/File Photo
SINGAPORE: Singapore is not a low-cost manufacturing base, but good infrastructure, respect for intellectual property, access to talent, and a government with a vision are what makes it the go-to destination for US pharma giant Pfizer.
“There are no short-term investments in the world of pharmaceuticals,” said Mike McDermott, chief global supply officer and executive vice-president of Pfizer.
He told The Straits Times in an interview: “Investments take a long time to come to fruition, and then we expect to be operating that for decades. It is not an in-and-out type of scenario.
“So, we need governments, we need partners that are in it for the long run along with us and Singapore fits within that perfectly.”
McDermott was speaking on the sidelines of the July 23 opening ceremony of a new S$1bil plant here, one of Pfizer’s most advanced manufacturing facilities among the company’s more than 30 sites spread across six continents.
The plant will produce active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) – the biologically active component of a drug – for Pfizer’s cancer, pain and antibiotic medicines.
The API produced here is then exported to Pfizer plants across the world that make injectable drugs or oral pills.
The new plant, an extension of an existing 20-year-old facility, is the first large-scale API manufacturing investment globally by Pfizer in many years.
Construction of the plant started in 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. McDermott said achieving the feat, despite various pandemic-related disruptions, speaks volumes about Singapore and its efficient and disciplined workforce.
About 4,500 workers, on average, were on-site during construction, and a total of 14,000 people were involved in getting the facility up and running, including Pfizer staff and contractors in Singapore and from all over the world.
“I would count the Singapore government and the Singapore citizens as brilliant in the ability to achieve this construction on time, on budget during a global pandemic,” said McDermott.
It produced a viable vaccine in just 10 months, a process that otherwise can take as long as a decade. It also produced three billion doses of the vaccine in a year, compared with its pre-pandemic annual production of 200 million doses.
“There were many challenges not just with scientifically coming up with the vaccine, but then how do you get it to patients in time and in a period when several countries were shutting down their borders,” said McDermott.
Given that the vaccines were being delivered only through government channels, Pfizer worked closely with government officials, boards of health and other institutions.
Pfizer also put together sophisticated supply chains, giving it the ability to quickly reroute shipments from ports and border crossings affected by lockdowns.
The company used innovative technologies not just to track a ship or a plane carrying vaccines, but also to track individual boxes in a plane, and individual shipments within a container on a ship.
Although the pandemic showed how important the free flow of goods and access to technology are, global supply chains and flow of technology are still vulnerable to many issues including geopolitics, McDermott said. — The Straits Times/ANN
