Manufacturing news in brief
pharmafile | July 20, 2010 | News story | Manufacturing and Production |Â Â Apicore, Emergent, Merck & Co, PPS, Tianyin, lillyÂ
A crop of facility announcements from Merck & Co, Emergent, Tianyin, Apicore and PPS offset more job loss news from Eli Lilly.
US biotech Emergent BioSolutions has formally opened its 56,000 sq.ft. biomanufacturing facility in Baltimore, Maryland, that will be used to make clinical and commercial supplies of its recombinant anthrax vaccine, antibody-based anthrax treatment and tuberculosis product candidates. The company says it is currently modifying and re-commissioning the facility to allow for increased use of disposable manufacturing technologies.
Eli Lilly will cut 170 positions in manufacturing and quality control this year as part of its ongoing restructuring, mostly at its Indianapolis site, according to a local press report. All told the drugmaker intends to cut around 950 of 3,600 manufacturing employees, reports the Indiana Business Journal. Last year Lilly said it intended to cut its global workforce by around 5,500 by the end of next year.
China’s Tianyin Pharmaceutical should complete a manufacturing plant in Jiangchuan, near Chengdu next month that will be able to produce 240 tonnes of macrolide antibiotic ingredients such as azithromycin, clarithromycin and roxithromycin every year.
Merck & Co has started construction of a 70,000 sq.m. packaging facility in Hangzhou, China, that is expected to come online in early 2012. The annual capacity of the plant will be 300 million packs, making it one of the largest in the Merck group. It will package solid dosage and sterile medicines for sale on the domestic Chinese market as well as clinical development supplies, according to the China Daily newspaper.
The US subsidiary of Indian company Apicore says that its active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing facility in Somerset, New Jersey, has passed a pre-approval inspection by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The green light is a key stage in Apicore’s bid to bring its fondaparinux sodium API to market in the US. Apicore filed a Drug Master File for fondaparinux sodium – the active ingredient in GlaxoSmithKline’s Arixtra for deep vein thrombosis – at the end of June.
Cell Therapeutics Inc has entered into a five-year manufacturing agreement with Italian contract manufacturer NerPharMa DS for commercial and clinical supply of pixantrone, CTI’s drug candidate for relapsed/refractory aggressive non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The drugmaker suffered a setback earlier this year when the FDA asked for another clinical trial of pixantrone in NHL, but in the meantime is pressing ahead with a European marketing application for the drug.
India’s Jubilant Organosys is planning to sell off its agri-chem and performance polymer businesses and become a life sciences pure play, providing contract research and manufacturing services to the pharmaceutical sector. Once complete the pharma business will be renamed Jubilant Life Sciences.
Israel’s Protein Production Services is planning to build a new 4,400 sq.m. facility to help its growing contract manufacturing business handle larger phase III clinical development and commercial-scale supply contracts. The new plant is scheduled to be operational in 2012 and will serve PPS’s clients as well as produce the firm’s own biosimilar products.
Phil Taylor
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