Pharma manufacturing news in brief
pharmafile | October 2, 2012 | News story | Manufacturing and Production |Â Â BIA Seperations, Hovione, Lonza, Merck MilliporeÂ
Hovione invests in particle design, Lonza signs deal for ADC production plus bioprocess news from BIA Separations and Merck Millipore.
Portuguese active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) and intermediate manufacturer Hovione has expanded its development services portfolio with the launch of a particle design platform that is designed to help clients solve issues of poor bioavailability, patient acceptability and other drug delivery challenges. The company says it has put together a ‘toolkit’ of technologies relating to spray dried dispersions – including crystal design, particle size reduction to the micro or nano-scale and amorphous solid dispersions – that can be used for a range of projects including highly-active APIs.
Lonza will manufacture an antibody-drug candidate (ADC) for Alzheimer’s disease for Intellect Neurosciences under the terms of a new contract between the two companies. The ADC – called Conjumab-A (IN-NO1-OX2) – is still in early-stage testing and combines an anti-amyloid antibody with a small-molecule neuroprotective drug. Lonza will make supplies of the drug at its plant in Visp, Switzerland, which has been updated in the last couple of years to cater for high-value products such as ADCs and high-potency active pharmaceutical ingredients.
Austrian company BIA Separations has teamed up with India’s Centre for Bio Separations Technology (CBST) in a project to develop new bioseparation platforms and technologies, particularly focusing on downstream purification and separations of large biomolecules. BIA said the deal was part of a wider strategy of building a bigger presence in India, which is now developing capacity in biologic drugs to complement its expertise in chemical APIs and generics. The company specialises in convective interaction media CIM), which are short monolithic chromatographic columns used to separate and purify large biomolecules and viral particles at lab and industrial scales.
Merck KGaA’s pharmaceutical technology unit Merck Millipore has opened a Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) production facility in Martillac, France, to provide access for customers to its disposable process equipment and expertise. The facility is designed as an ‘open source’ production platform that will allow users to specify the process alongside Merck Millipore experts, in contrast to the traditional outsourcing model. Martillac can handle production from 50L to 1,250L scale, which covers preclinical through Phase II development.
Phil Taylor
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