If you know Fujifilm primarily as the company behind Fujifilm X cameras, Instax and the films that refuse to die, its latest announcement may require a double take.
Fujifilm has entered a strategic partnership with Japanese pharmaceutical company Taiho Pharmaceutical to develop next-generation manufacturing technologies for antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs)—a class of targeted cancer medicines.
Yes, the same Fujifilm.
The announcement, made August 3, is a useful reminder that today's Fujifilm is a very different company from the one many photographers still have in their heads.
Under the agreement, Fujifilm will work with Taiho to optimize manufacturing processes for ADC candidates being developed using AraLinQ, a proprietary technology from Araris Biotech, which Taiho acquired. The goal is less about discovering the drugs themselves and more about solving a difficult manufacturing problem: producing these highly complex medicines consistently, at high quality and at scale.
From film chemistry to drug chemistry
The connection is actually less strange than it sounds. ADCs combine an antibody—which is designed to recognize a particular target—with a potent payload such as a cytotoxic drug. The idea is to use the antibody as a kind of biological delivery system, concentrating the payload on target cells while potentially reducing exposure to healthy tissue. Making them, however, is complicated. The antibody and payload have to be connected with considerable precision, and manufacturers need processes that produce a consistent product from batch to batch. That is where Fujifilm comes in. The company has spent years building a substantial biologics contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) business, developing and manufacturing antibody therapeutics for pharmaceutical companies. In other words, while photographers have been arguing about whether the X-T5 or X100VI is the better camera, Fujifilm has been quietly building expertise in manufacturing biological drugs. And it is getting deeper into ADCs. Fujifilm Toyama Chemical plans to launch Japan's first integrated ADC CDMO service in 2027, with a facility and manufacturing framework intended to cover the entire process—from antibody production and conjugation through final drug-product manufacturing. That is a long way from making a roll of Velvia.
The interesting part for photographers
Fujifilm's transformation isn't exactly new. The company's business is now divided across healthcare, electronics, business innovation and imaging, with imaging representing only one part of a much larger industrial and technology portfolio.
But the ADC partnership provides a particularly striking illustration of just how far that diversification has gone.
There is also a technological thread connecting the company's seemingly disparate businesses. Fujifilm's history is fundamentally a history of materials science, chemistry, precision manufacturing and imaging technology. Those capabilities didn't become obsolete when digital cameras displaced most photographic film. Instead, the company has repeatedly looked for places where the underlying expertise could be applied elsewhere.
Some of those businesses are now considerably larger than photography. That's why the company's continued investment in cameras and film is perhaps more interesting than it initially appears. Fujifilm doesn't need the imaging division to resemble the Fujifilm of 1995. It can maintain a photography business while using essentially the same corporate DNA—materials, chemistry, optics, electronics and manufacturing—to compete in completely different industries.
The company that makes your Acros II can also be developing the manufacturing process for an oncology drug.
And, increasingly, that's not the surprising part.