Press Room

Press Release / Aug 03, 2007

Hovione’s sales grow 16%

Sales reach USD 93.7 million (EUR 70,2 million) for the fiscal year ended March 31st 2007

Loures, Portugal, July 31st - Hovione announced today that the consolidated sales for the fiscal year ended March 31st 2007 amounted to USD 93.7M, representing a growth of 16% over the previous year.

According to Hovione’s CEO, Guy Villax, “This was a year of strong sales growth despite the continued strengthening of the Euro. The main contribution to this growth came from the business segments in which Hovione has been strategically investing over the last few years. We have recently developed two new business segments: particle design services and formulation development services for inhalation – both technically challenging areas that have limited offer in the market.”

In 2006 Hovione invested approximately USD 12M in R&D, with 140 people working in R&D both in lab and pilot-scale. Hovione supported pharmaceutical research in Europe and in the USA, custom synthesizing the development of more than 40 different pharmaceutical ingredients used in clinical trials all over the world. Over the last 12 months, 7 new patent applications were filed as a result of the research conducted at Hovione.

Geographically, Hovione’s sales in the USA market represented 46% of our total sales (43% in 2005), Europe 30% (29%), Japan 15% (18%) and ROW 5% (5%).

“We face 2007 with optimism. Our goal for this year is very clear – surpass USD 100M. I am confident that we can reach this goal!”, adds Guy Villax.

 

About Hovione
Hovione is a world-class company dedicated to the process development and compliant manufacture of APIs for the Pharmaceutical Industry. With a 48-year track record in process development, quality standard and advanced particle design technologies, Hovione offers APIs for all drug delivery systems, from oral to injectable and from inhalation to topical applications. With FDA inspected plants in Europe and the Far East and a Technology Transfer Centre in New Jersey, no manufacturing partner is better positioned to support API development from gram scale to commercialization.

Also in the Press Room

See All

Continuous Tableting (CT) is defined as continuous manufacturing of oral dose drugs, specifically tablets. As per ICH's Q13 definition1, a continuous manufacturing process in the pharmaceutical industry comprises at least two unit operations integrated from a mechanical and software perspective. There is a wide combination of possible CT process configurations that are dependent on the needs of the intended product formulation and each of the individual unit operations that constitute the process train can be continuous, semi-continuous, or batch processes. The typical manufacturing processes for tablet formulation are direct compression (DC), dry granulation (DG) and wet granulation (WG)2 - details on these manufacturing processes are beyond the scope of this article, so the interested reader is directed to relevant literature. The actual implementation of CT technology in a facility can broadly vary depending on the level of desired integration and automation. Process trains can be designed to be flexible and converted between multiple configurations (e.g. continuous DC, DG and WG), controlled by the end user from one single software and within a single clean room. The other possibility would be for subsections of the CT process to be divided into multiple clean rooms where inprocess materials are transferred between suites via a bin-to-bin approach (e.g. a granulation suite to prepare granules from raw materials followed by continuous DC (CDC) to blend the granules and produce tablets). The level of automation and instrumentation designed into the CT process (typically involving Process Analytical Technologies, PAT) can open the possibility to implement sophisticated control strategies. Key components of a control strategy that need to be considered for CT are material tracking and genealogy, knowledge of the residence time distribution (RTD), and in-process controls (spectroscopic and/or soft sensors based on process parameters). Holistically, these control strategy elements enable the implementation of a material diversion strategy to automatically divert out of specification material from the process. In their most advanced form, control strategies may also enable real time release testing (RTRt) of the final tablet drug product and reduce the off-line analytical burden and the number of operators needed to manage the process.   Read the full article at gmp-journal.com  

Article

Continuous Tableting and the Road to Global Adoption

Mar 04, 2024