Elan debuts manufacturing services business
pharmafile | October 5, 2010 | News story | Manufacturing and Production |Â Â ElanÂ
Irish pharmaceutical company Elan marked its official entry into the solid dose contract manufacturing sector today at the ongoing CPhI event in Paris, France.
The company also announced that it had appointed Philip Pratten to lead the group as vice president, manufacturing services operations. Pratten was formerly with Catalent Pharma Solutions and previously worked for Cardinal Health, GlaxoWellcome and the Wellcome Foundation.
Elan’s subsidiary Elan Drug Technologies has decades of experience in formulation and drug optimisation technologies, but in recent years has been expanding its capacity in scale-up and manufacturing services.
The contract manufacturing unit has grown out of EDT’s drug delivery business, which requires specialist production techniques. While some of EDT’s customers choose to license the technology and bring it in-house, others prefer EDT to make their products on a contract basis.
While CPhI marks the official launch of EDT as a contract manufacturing organisation, the company already has five years’ experience manufacturing one product for a big pharma company, and is also producing Acorda Therapeutics’ Ampyra (dalfampridine), a drug approved in the USA earlier this year for multiple sclerosis based on Elan’s MXDAS technology
As a contract manufacturer EDT can tap into capacity at its 505,000 sq.ft. facility in Athlone, which can handle up to 2 billion solid oral doses a year, as well as a 87,000 sq.ft. plant in Georgia, USA, with capacity of around 500 million solid oral doses. All told the company has 270,000 sq.ft. of Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) manufacturing space, including controlled substance units.
“For over 40 years, EDT has been a leading provider of drug delivery technologies and dosage form development for the pharmaceutical market,” said the company’s head Shane Cooke.
“We look forward to promoting our services in commercial scale-up and manufacturing, where we can offer a broad range of manufacturing solutions for our clients from our facilities in Europe and the US.”
EDT had sales of $276 million last year, with net income of $65 million. The company does not break out its individual contract manufacturing revenues, but says that manufacturing revenues combined with royalties on manufactured products were $136 million in 2009. The remainder of the total came from licensed royalties ($122 million) and contract R&D revenues ($19 million).
Last month Elan said it had dropped plans to spin the EDT unit out into a separate publicly-listed company for the second time, saying that economic conditions were not favourable. The company had also looked into the possibility of splitting its businesses back in 2008.
Phil Taylor
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