The Shed, page-40

Re the facility in Perth. I have never seen it so only know what I do from what I know of the Sanofi business.

Bascially the Malaga site was only built 5 years ago and was actually Verigen Australia, a subsidiary of Genzyme and used to manufacture their MACI implant. Sanofi wanting to exit the market were happy to offload the facility and later found Aastrom as a buyer for that side of the business.

It was by my reckoning a great deal for AHZ and personally was sginificant in that it shortcut the capital costs and risks of scale up. IMO it was a "lightning struck" event and of great benefit to AHZ.

Talk is it was a steal because it avoided redundancies and expensive site decommissioning. But critically, you have staff retention and a facility with TGA, FDA, EMA knowledge and proven Quality Systems as legacy from Sanofi-Genzyme. HUGE headstart for AHZ!

I understand it isnt the greatest or most kitted out facility with an approx construction cost of about 10million. So doubt it is suited to anything over and above Cardiocel production (ie, no HSV2 vaccine capability etc)

But the critical thing is it has suitably classified clean rooms, clean utilities and QC labs. Far better to have it fall in your lap then to build that capacity yourself and then try to staff it.