Quotient Sciences, a UK-based firm that describes itself as a “drug development and manufacturing accelerator”, has integrated drug substance into its flagship Translational Pharmaceutics platform, uniting it with drug product and clinical testing activities within one organisation under a single project manager. This follows a year after the acquisition of the former Arcinova site at Alnwick.
Portuguese CDMO Hovione, whose key technical specialities include spray drying and particle engineering, has concluded a strategic partnership under which it will market and commercialise Zerion’s solubility enhancement technology platform, Dispersome. Zerion was spun out from the University of Copenhagen in 2019, following a decade of research.
Indian-based CDMO Piramal Pharma Solutions (PPS) is to invest about £55 million to expand two sites in the UK. It will expand its antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) capabilities at Grangemouth in Scotland and new API infrastructure at Morpeth in north-east England.
Italian CDMO Olon has completed a large-scale high containment production line (OEL < 1 mg/m3) at its Rodano site at a cost of about €10 million. This is part of a planned €27 million it will roll out over 2022-3 that is fully allocated to the expansion of further internal expertise and capacity of high containment production. The new line, which is already operative, enables Olon to produce HPAPIs in batches of 30-250 kg.
The US-based Green Chemistry division of the Minafin Group has formed a strategic partnership with Origin Materials of West Sacramento in California to industrialise speciality products based on Origin’s biobased, carbon-negative materials in the pharmaceutical, agricultural, cosmetics and personal care, and automotive industries. No further terms were disclosed.
Connecticut-based CDMO TriRx Pharmaceutical Services has finalized and closed on an agreement to buy Elanco Animal Health’s site in Speke, near Liverpool, UK. The two companies had agreed a two-facility sale and long-term supply agreement in 2021, covering this site and another in Shawnee, Kansas, which it took over last August.
Novasep has signed a letter of intent to supply the API for Pfizer’s Paxlovid, an oral protease inhibitor against COVID-19 that has shown a positive impact in clinical trials on hospitalisation among at-risk patients Technical transfer, on-site development and equipment installation activities have begun already at the Mourenx facility in France, which is expected to be incorporated into the supply chain by Q3.
