While Mid­dle­town, Delaware’s main claim to fame was the site lo­ca­tion for the film the Dead Po­ets So­ci­ety, the city will soon play host to a mas­sive man­u­fac­tur­ing out­fit.

WuXi AppTec’s con­tract re­search and man­u­fac­tur­ing sub­sidiary WuXi STA, has bro­ken ground on a 190-acre man­u­fac­tur­ing cam­pus in Mid­dle­town.

Ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny, this site will be WuXi’s sec­ond fa­cil­i­ty in the US, and it will cre­ate around 500 full-time jobs by 2026, but there are plans to kick off op­er­a­tions in 2025.

A re­port from the Delaware Bio­Science As­so­ci­a­tion said WuXi paid $30 mil­lion for the land with the site cost­ing a to­tal of $510 mil­lion. The site is al­so backed by $19 mil­lion in tax­pay­er-fund­ed grants.

The com­pa­ny states that this is the first phase of the new cam­pus. While it did not pro­vide in­for­ma­tion on what ex­act prod­ucts will be man­u­fac­tured once com­plet­ed, the site will be able to pro­vide for­mu­la­tion de­vel­op­ment and clin­i­cal and com­mer­cial drug prod­uct man­u­fac­tur­ing ser­vices for oral and in­jectable prod­ucts. The site will al­so be able to pack­age, la­bel, store and dis­trib­ute ser­vices for clin­i­cal tri­al ma­te­ri­als and com­mer­cial drug prod­ucts.

“WuXi STA con­tin­ues to in­crease our ca­pa­bil­i­ties and ca­pac­i­ties to bet­ter serve our cus­tomers through a more ro­bust and re­li­able sup­ply chain. With our in­te­grat­ed Con­tract Re­search, De­vel­op­ment, and Man­u­fac­tur­ing Or­ga­ni­za­tion (CRD­MO) plat­form and proven qual­i­ty sys­tem, we look for­ward to work­ing with our cus­tomers to swift­ly de­liv­er their in­no­v­a­tive ther­a­pies to mar­ket in or­der to save lives and im­prove health­care for pa­tients,” said WuXi CEO Minzhang Chen in a state­ment.

The com­pa­ny said in an email to End­points News that Delaware was cho­sen be­cause the state has a grow­ing health­care in­dus­try as well as a high­ly trained phar­ma man­u­fac­tur­ing work­force.

While the com­pa­ny al­so did not go in­to de­tails about any fu­ture build­ing phas­es, when the site was an­nounced in 2021, the com­pa­ny said the site could ex­pand to hire more than 1,000 em­ploy­ees, with 600,000 square feet of space in at least three build­ings, in­clud­ing one for drugs, one for ad­min­is­tra­tion, and one for drug sub­stances.

While WuXi finds it­self in good com­pa­ny with com­pa­nies such as As­traZeneca and Charles Riv­er in Delaware, the com­pa­ny has been look­ing to ex­pand rapid­ly across the globe.

This year the com­pa­ny has opened an HPA­PI plant at its Changzhou site in Jiang­su, Chi­na, and two large-scale oligonu­cleotide and pep­tide man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ties at its cam­pus in Changzhou, Chi­na. Last year the com­pa­ny ac­quired Bris­tol My­ers Squibb’s site in Cou­vet, Switzer­land, which spe­cial­izes in com­mer­cial-scale pro­duc­tion of var­i­ous cap­sules and tablet dosage forms.