Argentina’s Grupo Insud is building a biologics platform: mAbxience exports biosimilars across three continents while Sinergium anchors Latin America’s mRNA vaccine sovereignty.
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PHARMA · SEPTEMBER 14, 2026 · LATIN AMERICA
Pharma · Biomanufacturing · September 2026 · Argentina / Latin America
💊 A region moving from importer to producer · 🌎 Biosimilar exports across three continents · 🧪 Latin America’s node in the global mRNA transfer · 🏥 Pandemic autonomy as the prize
Argentina is quietly assembling something Latin America has never really had: a home-grown platform for advanced biologics. Two arms of a single Buenos Aires group — one exporting biosimilars, the other building mRNA vaccine capacity — are testing whether the region can produce, not just buy, the medicines of the next decade.
US$40M
mAbxience’s Garín plant near Buenos Aires, which doubled the company’s antibody capacity
3
continents mAbxience exports biosimilars to; Abbott partnership targets emerging markets
2026
target for Sinergium’s new mRNA plant, the WHO transfer programme’s Latin American hub
US$1M
CEPI award (Dec 2025) for Sinergium’s preclinical mRNA work on avian influenza
Sources: Insud Pharma / mAbxience (insudpharma.com, mabxience.com); World Health Organization (who.int) and Pan American Health Organization (paho.org) mRNA-transfer announcements; Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (cepi.net).
The pieces belong to Grupo Insud, an Argentine holding whose biosimilars unit, mAbxience, and vaccines company, Sinergium Biotech, pursue the same goal from opposite ends. mAbxience makes copies of complex antibody drugs once their patents expire. Its US$40 million plant in Garín, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, doubled the group’s manufacturing capacity when it opened, and the company now exports across Central and South America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. A strategic agreement with Abbott — broadening an earlier deal — puts mAbxience biosimilars in oncology, women’s health and respiratory disease into Abbott’s emerging-market distribution across Latin America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East and Africa. A newer facility in León, Spain, adds a 4,000-litre single-use bioreactor, extending the platform from the region into Europe.
Sinergium is the more strategically charged bet. In July 2024 the World Health Organization (WHO) named it the manufacturing lead for a project to develop an mRNA vaccine against H5N1 avian influenza — the pathogen at the top of most pandemic watchlists — working with South Africa’s Afrigen and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) under the WHO’s mRNA Technology Transfer Programme. The programme’s premise is precisely the lesson of the last pandemic: that low- and middle-income countries cannot depend on the Global North for supply, and must own the know-how themselves. A new mRNA plant is targeted to come online in 2026, and in December 2025 the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) committed US$1 million to advance the preclinical candidate, with results to be published open-access.
For two decades Latin America’s biologics story was a procurement story. Grupo Insud is trying to make it a manufacturing one — biosimilars for revenue today, mRNA sovereignty for the crisis tomorrow.
The caveats are real. The 2026 plant and the H5N1 candidate’s move into Phase 1 are targets, not milestones met, and the vaccine has no clinical efficacy data yet; the “low-cost jab” is still aspirational. Argentina’s currency instability and import controls complicate any capital-intensive build, and the mRNA effort leans on multilateral funding from the WHO, CEPI and Canada — support that could thin. mAbxience’s commercial terms and true aggregate capacity are undisclosed, making the export story hard to size. And the sovereignty narrative is contested: Brazil’s Fiocruz and Butantan are chasing the same regional-hub role. But the direction is unmistakable, and for a middle-income country it is an unusual one — from buyer to platform owner.
Why this is relevant
💊 Industry. A single Argentine group running both a biosimilar exporter and an mRNA-transfer hub is the clearest sign yet that Latin American biomanufacturing is moving up the value chain, with a multinational (Abbott) validating the export model.
🌎 Access. Biosimilars produced in and for emerging markets can widen access to expensive biologic therapies that regional payers struggle to afford — the practical near-term payoff of local manufacturing.
🏥 Pandemic preparedness. Owning mRNA production capacity in the region is a hedge against the supply inequities of the last pandemic — strategically valuable even before the first vaccine is proven, and a template other Latin American producers will watch.
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