Jakarta — Indonesia’s Ministry of Health has said it has successfully attracted a number of large-scale foreign investments in the downstream health industry, including plasma and vaccines, as part of the third pillar of the Health Transformation agenda: Health Resilience.
Minister of Health Budi Gunadi Sadikin said in Jakarta on Friday that throughout 2026, the Government had secured a major investment commitment from Japanese company Takeda to build a factory for blood plasma-derived products.
He explained that the acceleration of downstreaming was driven by the crisis experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Indonesia faced severe shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), masks, PCR reagents, vaccines, and essential medicines due to its dependence on imported products.
“During the pandemic, people faced significant difficulties and had to pay high prices to obtain essential medicines in the Plasma Derived Products (PDP) category, such as Albumin, IVIG, Factor VIII, and Factor IX,” he said.
PDPs are medicines that support immunity and blood clotting. These medicines are produced through the downstream process of separating, or fractionating, plasma from human blood.
“As the country with the fourth-largest population in the world, we actually have abundant blood raw material resources that can be processed independently into PDPs. This is what we are currently downstreaming,” he said.
To achieve this self-sufficiency, the Ministry of Health has relaxed regulations related to the construction of plasma factories since 2023. This policy attracted the interest of South Korean biopharmaceutical company SK Plasma, which partnered with the Indonesia Investment Authority (INA) in 2024.
The SK Plasma factory, involving an investment of USD 300 million and with a production capacity of 600,000 litres per year, was completed in 2026. Indonesia’s first plasma fractionation facility is targeted to become fully operational in 2027, after obtaining marketing authorisation and operational permits from the Food and Drug Monitoring Agency (BPOM).
Budi said this positive investment climate was followed by the entry of Takeda, one of the world’s largest PDP producers, as an investor in Indonesia’s second plasma factory, with an even larger production capacity.
In addition to the blood plasma industry, he said, progress towards self-sufficiency has also been achieved in vaccine production. The Ministry of Health has encouraged the operation of two large-scale domestic vaccine factories, namely PT Etana Biotechnologies Indonesia and PT Biotis Pharmaceuticals Indonesia.
In particular, PT Biotis has also developed the Merah Putih Vaccine, which is the result of research conducted entirely by Indonesian experts.
“Through the Health Resilience Transformation, we are not merely learning from the crisis, but taking concrete action to address it. With the establishment of production facilities by Etana, Biotis, SK Plasma, and Takeda, the availability of medicines and vaccines for the public in the future will be secure, affordable, and produced domestically,” Budi said.
Source from ANTARA News
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