The purchase of Molecular Medicine BioServices (MMB), based in Carlsbad, California, is intended to help SAFC focus on the flourishing area of biologic drug development.

In 2004 SAFC, part of the Sigma-Aldrich group, bought its first two biologics businesses, UK company Ultrafine and US company Tetroinics.

Sigma-Aldrich Corporation treasurer Kirk Richter said this was a positive move into a market that showed "a lot of potential".

"This will expand our capabilities to produce more active ingredients specifically for gene therapies. It was a direction we wanted to go in anyway," he told Outsourcing-Pharma.com.

"I think we fully intend to participate in that [biologic drug manufacturing] market."

Richter said he expected the MMB acquisition to help achieve an overall 10 per cent growth for the company in the next few years, which would concentrate on oncology, Alzheimer's disease and cardiovascular disease.

SAFC president Frank Wicks said: "The acquisition of MMB continues our push into niche biologics, giving us the critical capability to manufacture virus. It also complements both our new transgenic extraction and purification facility which opened last month in St. Louis and our potent bacterial fermentation facility currently under construction in Israel."

Terms of the purchase, which were not disclosed, were paid in cash.

Biologics are a relatively new class of drugs produced in living cells, which were first used in 1998, but are rapidly growing into a billion-dollar industry, particularly in the area of cancer treatment.

These drugs account for almost 20 per cent of all dollars spent on drugs in the US with an expected rise to 25 per cent by 2008, according to biologicdrugreport.com.

Already, 14 biologic drugs have been approved in the US and in other countries, notably Roche/Genentech's Herceptin (trastuzumab) for breast cancer, and more than 70 are in late stage clinical trial with over 1000 in preclinical development.