Selecting an appropriate path for acquiring commercial-scale biopharmaceutical manufacturing capacity often requires the rationalisation of multiple conflicting criteria and the reconciling of financial and non-financial issues. Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) can provide a holistic framework for evaluating such scenarios. This paper presents the development of a decision-support framework for decision-making scenarios involving the acquisition of commercial-scale biopharmaceutical manufacturing capacity that utilises MCDM. To illustrate the functionality of the framework. a hypothetical scenario was constructed based on a biopharmaceutical company faced with a number of options for acquiring commercial manufacturing capacity. A deterministic analysis showed that building manufacturing capacity was the highest ranking option for the scenario considered. Stochastic analyses demonstrated that this option was also the highest ranking overall. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.