Pharma manufacturing news in brief
pharmafile | November 9, 2010 | News story | Manufacturing and Production |Â Â Genentech, Hovione, Jacobs Engineering, Laureate Pharma, Recipharm, contract manufacturing, pharma manufacturingÂ
Hovione wins a patent dispute, Genentech is awarded for a manufacturing plant and there are new contracts for Recipharm, Jacobs Engineering and Laureate Pharma, plus a new excipient reaches the market.
The US Patent and Trademark’s Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences has backed up claims by Portuguese active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturer Hovione to a method of making flumethasone and its 17-carboxyl androsten analogue, two key intermediates on the synthesis of fluticasone, a corticosteroid used in asthma drugs. A rival firm, believed to be Italian API manufacturer Famabios, had attempted to show that the method in Hovione’s patent was obvious and therefore invalid.
Genentech’s ECP-1 bacterial manufacturing facility in Tuas, Singapore, has been named overall winner of the 2010 Facility of the Year Awards (FOYA) programme sponsored by the International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineering. The Tuas facility is used to manufacture Genentech’s Lucentis (ranibizumab) drug for age-related macular degeneration, and presented “significant schedule, cost, and execution challenges, according to ISPE. Despite these, the company brought the project in 10.5% under its $217 million budget and two weeks early.
Swedish drugmaker DuoCort Pharma has retained contract development and manufacturing firm Recipharm to scale up the manufacture of its lead product DuoCort, a once-daily hydrocortisone tablet for the treatment of Addison’s disease. The Swedish firm filed for approval of DuoCort as an orphan drug for the treatment of Addison’s, which is characterised by chronic adrenal insufficiency, earlier this year.
Fine chemical company Celanese has launched a new controlled-release excipient based on ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) polymers, under the VitalDose brand, which it says “offers a wide degree of flexibility in the design of transdermal, subcutaneous implant and mucosal insert dosage forms”. The excipient also has customisable release properties and the potential for new delivery routes to be used in the development of pharmaceutical product line extensions, said Celanese.
Jacobs Engineering has said it will provide detailed engineering services for a new multi-purpose manufacturing facility at Chongqing Changshou Chemical Industrial Park in China, which is under construction for active pharmaceutical ingredient and intermediate manufacturer Porton Fine Chemicals. Jacobs said the contract was its first in China.
US contract manufacturing organisation Laureate Pharma has been awarded a contract from AVEO Pharmaceuticals for the production of AV-203, its ErbB3-targetting monoclonal antibody candidate for breast and other cancers Laureate’s services will include process development, protein production, purification and aseptic filling of the antibody.
Phil Taylor
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