Pharma manufacturing in brief
pharmafile | January 3, 2012 | News story | Manufacturing and Production |Â Â IGI Laboratories, aseptic packagingÂ
Pharma manufacturing news in brief
CPL shuts down a facility in New Jersey, US, Tamer plans a new plant in Saudi Arabia and Shasun expands in the UK, plus a new contract for IGI and growth in the aseptic packaging market.
US company Contract Pharmaceuticals Ltd has finally shut down a manufacturing facility in Buffalo, New York, with the loss of around 260 jobs. The closure of the plant was first announced in 2010, when CPL said it had decided to shift production of the products made there to another plant in Ontario, Canada. At the time the decision was taken the 415,000 sq. ft. Buffalo plant was operating at just 25% capacity.
Tamer Group is buying 500,000 sq. m. of land in the King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia that will be developed as a site for industrial manufacturing purposes, including a 5,000 sq. m. facility for producing pharmaceuticals, according to local news reports. Tamer is a leading supplier of branded, generic and over-the-counter medicines, as well as foods and consumer goods. Its manufacturing business operates under the Saudi Arabian Japanese Pharmaceutical Manufacturing (SAJA) banner, joint venture with Daiichi Sankyo and Astellas Pharma.
India’s Shasun Pharmaceuticals has been awarded a £400,000 grant from the UK government to support a £2 million investment programme in its manufacturing plant in Dudley, UK, which has created around 20 jobs. The company said it has built up capacity for niche product manufacturing segments at Dudley, and is expecting to earn around £5 million annually thanks to the installation of new technologies at the plant. The UK subsidiary has a pre-launch pipeline of 19 projects in the second and third phase of clinical study. Currently, it has a contract manufacturing portfolio of around 28 launched products.
US demand for aseptic packaging for pharmaceuticals is expected to grow by 8.4% a year to reach $3.4 billion in 2015, outstripping the wider overall pharma packaging market, according to market research firm Freedonia Group. Drivers of the market will include the increasing availability of injectable biologic medicines which are too temperature-sensitive to allow the use of conventional terminal sterilisation processes, as well as the rising preference among healthcare providers for unit-dose delivery formats. Typical sterile packaging formats used in pharma include aseptic vials/ampoules and prefillable syringes, with the latter category tipped to grow at 11% a year to reach $1.1 billion in 2015.
IGI Laboratories has won a contract from Medimetriks Pharmaceuticals to develop, manufacture and distribute a series of topical prescription pharmaceuticals that are due to reach the US market in the middle of 2012. Meanwhile, IGI has also extended its manufacturing services contract with dermatology product specialist Neostrata for another three years.
Phil Taylor
