The foreign-invested firm Celltrion has set up a bio-medicine plant in Songdo New City, the fifth of its kind in the world.

The company on Monday said construction began in 2003 at a cost of 240 billion won.

The facility can produce 50,000 liters of bio-medicine cultivated from animal cells.

Production will begin in 2007 after approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the company will spend a trillion won to develop 30 new drugs by 2010.

The U.S. biotech firm VaxGen and a group of ethnic Korean partners founded Celltrion in Songdo in 2002 as the largest biopharmaceutical contract manufacturer in Asia.