A once-niche manufacturing technology is going mainstream, as biopharma’s biggest players bet billions on replacing batch production with “always-on” continuous bioprocessing.
According to Astute Analytica’s 2026 market report, the continuous bioprocessing market was valued at $319.77 million in 2025 and is projected to reach $2.33 billion by 2035 — a CAGR of 21.98%, making it one of the fastest-growing segments in biopharma manufacturing.
The core appeal is economic. Continuous bioprocessing can cut production costs per gram by 50% and reduce facility footprints by 51% compared to legacy batch systems. For a sector under intense pricing pressure, particularly in biosimilars, where the FDA approved a record 18 products in 2024, that cost advantage is increasingly non-negotiable.
Three dynamics are accelerating adoption:
- mAbs are pulling the market: Keytruda alone generated $29.48 billion in 2024. Revenues at that scale force manufacturers to squeeze every efficiency gain from production — continuous platforms are the answer.
- CDMOs are moving fastest: The CMO/CRO segment is forecast to grow at the highest rate of any end-use category, as contract manufacturers race to offer continuous capabilities to attract next-generation biologics programs.
- Billions are being committed: AstraZeneca ($4.5B in Virginia), Novo Nordisk ($4.1B in North Carolina), Sanofi (€1B in France), and Amgen ($900M in Ohio) are all building or expanding facilities natively designed for continuous manufacturing.
North America holds 39% market share, but Asia Pacific is the volume engine — Samsung Biologics now has 784,000 liters of capacity, serving 17 of the top 20 global pharma companies, while WuXi Biologics sits on an $18.5 billion backlog.
The key constraint on growth is talent. With 60,000 biomanufacturing roles unfilled in the US alone, continuous lines require a fundamentally different skillset than batch, and the workforce simply hasn’t caught up yet.
Source: Astute Analytica, Continuous Bioprocessing Market Report, 2026
