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Diane Villax poses in 1962 with her husband, Ivan (left), and this year with her son, Guy, in front of the house, Guy’s current home, where she and Ivan launched Hovione in 1959.     Diane Villax, Hovione’s still-active matriarch, recounts the rise of the pioneering firm He started, the poor chap, at the age of 23,” recalls Diane Villax of her son Guy’s debut in 1984 at Hovione, the family’s pharmaceutical chemical business. “He was thrown to the lions in the Far East. To China. He was told by his father, ‘Build me a factory in Macau. Get me some land, talk to the authorities, and build me a factory.” This he did, she says. “He built it in 14 months, ran it for six months, and asked for an FDA inspection.” Still marveling at the audacity of the project, Diane recounts the many roadblocks to building a factory in Macau, a former Portuguese colony, now a Las Vegas-like gaming resort, where no construction engineers were up to the project in 1984. Shipping construction materials, glass-lined tanks, and other apparatuses from Italy, Greece, and the company’s home base of Lisbon was another daunting challenge, given that the only suitable cargo port was in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her daughter, Sofia, was also deployed to China, in charge of quality control at the new plant. Diane remembers Sofia calling home rattled after an interview with an inspector who brusquely dismissed the upstart plant’s chances of passing a U.S. Food & Drug Administration audit. “Poor child,” she says. “Well, they had the inspection, and it was fine, so then they all celebrated.” Over a Saturday lunch of boiled prawns and salad on the patio of her home in a Lisbon suburb, Diane shares several other anecdotes of how she and her husband, the chemist Ivan Villax, started a company in their basement, developing fermentation processes for the manufacture of antibiotics. It has evolved over 59 years to become a major supplier of drug ingredients and associated services, with factories on three continents. Ivan died in 2003, but at 83 Diane remains active with Hovione. She is a board member, having stepped down as chair only two years ago. Guy and Sofia are also on the board, along with four outside nonexecutive directors, including the current chair. Passing the chair to an outsider, Diane says, seemed like the thing to do now that the company has achieved a critical mass.   Born in Portugal but raised in England—her mother Portuguese, her father British—Diane Du Boulay met Ivan, a Hungarian chemist displaced by the Russian invasion after World War II, in 1956. Both their families had moved to Lisbon. Ivan came from France, where he studied microbiology, developing chemistry for penicillin, tetracycline, and other antibiotics in his spare time. “I think he got his first patent in 1955,” Diane recalls. “He was enjoying life in Lisbon. A young man about town and a scientist and a bit of a magician at dinner parties. He was very much in demand.” The two married and started the company with two partners, both of whom left shortly thereafter. Diane and Ivan began by selling antibiotics and other generic drugs, achieving their first big success selling betamethasone in Japan. They built a manufacturing plant on land his family owned outside Lisbon in Loures. “Ivan was obviously the inventor, the producer, and the salesman,” she says. “Somebody had to look after the back office, issue invoices, talk to the banks, and get some money. So that was me. For 35 years, nobody signed a check except for me. I was in charge of all the imports and exports and all the licenses.” The focus remained on generics, Diane says, until Guy came back from an InformEx exposition in the U.S. in 1993, enthusiastic about exclusive synthesis of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). They got a call from Bristol-Myers Squibb shortly thereafter with a request to make an API, found a chemical engineer willing to take on the complicated chemistry, and never turned back. Nor has Diane disengaged from oversight of the company’s business, which in one famous instance involved direct engagement with a chemical. Early on, with Ivan on the road, Diane was awakened one night by a chemical smell in the house. She called an engineer who worked for the company, and the two identified a leaking vessel in the basement. They found an empty container. Preparing to transfer the contents of the vessel, Diane realized that someone would have to suck on the hose to get the liquid moving. The engineer demurred, noting that they had no idea what was leaking. “I had to do it,” she says. “Somebody had to get it going.” The operation was a success, and Diane soon learned that the solvent was ethyl acetate. “My husband was rather horrified when he learned of this.” Diane Villax was awarded Portugal’s Scientific Merit Medal at the opening of Science 2017, a science and technology meeting in Lisbon. The medal is given in recognition of contributions to the development of science and scientific culture in Portugal.   Read the article at C&EN online   Discover our 60+ years of history  

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How Hovione grew from a basement lab to a global pharmaceutical services company

Nov 12, 2018

A pharmaceutical services pioneer cues up continuous tableting as it doubles manufacturing. Guy Villax, CEO of Hovione, stands in the central hall of the company’s new R&D center in Lisbon. On the wall beside him is a mural with photographs commemorating the family-owned pharmaceutical chemistry firm’s milestones since it was founded by his parents, Ivan and Diane Villax, 59 years ago. There is also a nearly floor-to-ceiling portrait of Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple. Guy Villax is fond of extolling innovation and inspirational figures such as Jobs and Charles Darwin, who on another mural is quoted regarding species’ responsiveness to change. That mural also nods to an evolution in how Hovione regards the scientists who work in R&D. His father, he explains, was a man of his times. “He didn’t give much space to empowerment and all that,” he says. Villax, on the other hand, has been giving employee empowerment a lot of space recently.   The 7,000-m2 R&D center was designed with low-walled cubicles and picture windows looking into labs and conference rooms. A large tote board on the second floor lists the company’s patents, with a good number of entries—failed applications—crossed out with red lines. Banners from the ceiling celebrate the launch of new drugs for which Hovione supplied active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and other services. There were four in 2017, close to 10% of the 46 drugs approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. Villax says he wants to get chemists to look up from the bench at the big picture. “It feels a little less inhuman, not doing the Charlie Chaplin things,” he says, referring to Chaplin’s skewering of the machine age in the film “Modern Times.” “If you give people a sense of what it’s all about and how they contribute, they fill in their batch records with greater care. But to keep people excited about doing new things, you have to give them the right tools.” R&D at headquarters is one thing. Manufacturing on three continents is another, for a family-owned firm with plans to double capacity at most of its sites. But Villax sees a continuum from the lab to the plant in which developments in both realms are guided by innovative science and customer demand. It’s a philosophy that has kept Hovione afloat as many other firms in the drug service industry get swallowed up by financial buyers or big corporations. Indeed, Hovione has been adding tools beyond the lab, including at its plant in nearby Loures, where it is doubling manufacturing capacity and starting up a finished-dosage drug plant it acquired in 2015 and then retooled. Meanwhile, the company is adding a second pilot plant at its smaller-scale facility in East Windsor, N.J., and commissioning the second of two manufacturing buildings at a large-scale facility in Cork, Ireland, capacity that has been mothballed since Hovione bought the site from Pfizer in 2009. The company has also added a wholly new tool in New Jersey—a continuous tableting plant­—for which it has a contract to work with Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Hovione will offer the service for other customers there and in Lisbon, where a similar plant is scheduled to be installed. Hovione invested about $100 million in 2017 and plans to spend as much again this year and next. The plan over the next three years is to continue investing, especially in Portugal, where the firm will add 165 m3 of chemical synthesis capacity, a spray-dryer building, and a 1,200-m2 analytical lab. Hovione’s capacity expansion is ambitious but somewhat conventional for a firm whose major investments have historically startled industry watchers. In 1985, for example, Hovione built a plant in Macau, the first instance of a European drug service company investing in China. In 2002, it opened the New Jersey plant, starting a trend of European firms establishing small-scale beachheads in the U.S. Then came the Cork acquisition, which, in addition to bulking up manufacturing capacity with a plant Pfizer no longer needed, brought a huge spray-drying facility. Hovione pioneered and remains a leader among firms offering this now-popular service. If anything, the move into tableting is a bit of catch-up for Villax, who not long ago spoke skeptically of peers adding final-dosage service to chemistry. The merger of DSM’s pharmaceutical chemical business with Patheon’s finished-drug service was a seeming vindication of this one-stop-shop approach. Several other firms, including Siegfried, Carbogen Amcis, and Aesica, also invested in dosage-form manufacturing, as Hovione held fast with chemistry alone. Villax finally blinked in 2015, purchasing a plant literally over the fence from Hovione’s main site in Loures. Villax insists he would never have added dosage services if the plant weren’t adjacent to API manufacturing. He says the company now has two customers for which it does particle engineering, API synthesis, and final product manufacturing at the one site.   He emphasizes that Hovione had signed up Vertex for continuous tableting before committing to the cutting-edge technology in New Jersey. Dosage-form service “is not a leap or change in direction,” he insists. “Who do you think showed us the way? The clients.” In New Jersey, site general manager Filipe Tomás is focused on increasing capacity for clients in the early stages of drug development. “This site cannot be at maximum capacity,” he says. “We expect to be at 60% to 70% occupancy and always be a door to customers when they have a lead.” And that door is about to open on continuous tableting, which is beginning registration runs and is set to go into commercial production next year. Hovione’s hope that the service will be of interest is borne out several miles away at the Rutgers University Engineering Research Center for Structured Organic Particulate Systems. There, engineers have worked with Vertex and Janssen Pharmaceuticals, firms that Douglas Hausner, associate director of industrial liaison at the center, describes as early adopters. Hovione hired several students and engineers from the center as it secured the contract with Vertex. Tomás sees the addition of tableting as a natural progression in pharmaceutical services rather than a break from Hovione’s chemistry tradition. The new apparatus, a three-story rig with a belt of tablet troughs running from top to bottom, is utterly unlike the pilot reactors elsewhere in the facility. “This is a technology that we think adds value,” specifically that of speed to market, Tomás says. He points to a newly constructed space near the tableting machinery in which the company may add blister packaging, a service Vertex is not currently signed on for. The site has also doubled its research space with the creation of an open environment that mirrors the new Lisbon center. Along with a significant increase in staff, the New Jersey labs have increased technical firepower in areas such as particle design and engineering. Back in Lisbon, Cláudia Ferreira, general manager of R&D services, says research and technology have seen many changes in recent years but have still followed one basic course. “Hovione always takes advantage of its core way of working, which is science driven and innovation driven. That hasn’t changed.” Rafael Antunes, senior director of R&D, adds that remaining a family-owned company allows Hovione to take risks and make long-term investments, including in its research endeavors. “We like to be challenged,” he says. “We feel we have to differentiate ourselves from the competition, to set the bar high on the technologies we adopt, and to have the right people.”   Hovione employs about 90 Ph.D. scientists. Under a program launched five years ago, 11 Ph.D. students are doing research at the firm. The four who have completed their program have been hired by the company. “What you have in our industry, as in so many others, is an expansion of knowledge and technology,” Villax says. “You have to keep up, and you have to solve problems faster.” James Bruno, president of the consulting firm Chemical & Pharmaceutical Solutions, says that Villax makes some risky moves but that they tend to pay off, with the latest venture in continuous tableting appearing to be another good one. “Sometimes I’ve scratched my head and said, ‘What is he thinking?’ ” Bruno says. “But five years later, you got to go back and say, ‘Well, you know, that was a pretty good idea.’ I think Guy always has a tendency to be a step ahead of everybody else in general. He’s doing things that people are thinking about doing.” Villax says he’s often challenged on the question of whether, despite a good run, a major disruption in pharmaceutical technology might “get Hovione bankrupt.” This, he admits, is a good question. But he also points to an uninterrupted line in pharmacology development that has yet to be disrupted by genomics, digital technologies, and other game-changing leaps in science. “I think the pharmacy is something relatively unchanged for 30,000 or 40,000 years. Even when you had hunters and gatherers, I’m sure there were some people who knew what certain plants did for you. So I can’t see what is really going to disrupt us,” he says, smiling. “Famous last words!”   Read the article at C&EN online  

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Hovione bulks up, with a twist

Nov 12, 2018

Rick Mullin interviews Frédéric Kahn at CPhI North America.         Hovione, which has likewise added services, including spray drying and finished-dose form manufacturing, in the past two years, continues to invest both at its headquarters in Loures, Portugal, and at its technology center in East Windsor, N.J. The company spent about $100 million in 2017 and plans to invest as much again this year and next, according to Vice President for Sales and Marketing Frédéric Kahn. Hovione opened a 7,000-m2 development services center at its main manufacturing facility in Loures, equipped to handle highly potent compounds. With 200 people hired over the past three years, the site now employs a staff of 1,600. Hovione may hire another 200, Kahn said. In New Jersey, the company is in the process of doubling chemistry and analytical service capacity and will begin operating a continuous tableting facility this month. Kahn says Hovione is interested in offering one-site shopping in Portugal and New Jersey. The plan over the next three years is to continue investment, especially in Portugal, Kahn said, where the firm will add 165 m3 of chemical synthesis capacity, a spray-dryer building, and a 1,200-m3 analytical lab. “This is capacity that we are going to have to sell,” Kahn acknowledged, “but we pursued it by listening to our customers—by understanding what their requirements are in terms of API, formulation, solubility enhancements, and continuous tableting.” Kahn declined to call the added services a push toward the one-stop-shop model. Rather, he said, the firm will now offer one-site, full-supply-chain service in both Portugal and New Jersey.   Read the entire article    

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The good times keep rolling in pharmaceutical chemicals

May 29, 2018

Smart companies are focusing on internal training schemes to develop and mentor graduate employees. The challenge of attracting the right people in a highly competitive recruitment market is leading many organisations to consider developing their own talent from within. While formal graduate programmes are nothing new in larger organisations, such schemes are becoming more common at smaller companies. Recruitment firm Fastnet, which has offices in Cork and Dublin, has been successful at developing its own talent rather than hiring from competitors over the past 15 or 20 years, according to managing partner Niamh O’Driscoll. She said a formal graduate programme that brings people into the company at a very early stage was the next logical step. The first two graduates- one with a psychology degree and the other with a biochemistry background- have been taken on for the two year rotational programme. After six months getting to grips with all aspects of Fastnet’s business, the new hires will work in the talent acquisition division, focused initially on quality and laboratory, and then on engineering. “We have a very specific methodology and core values”, said O’ Driscoll. “The programme allows us to instil our values from the beginning and will help ensure there is a consistent pipeline of quality talent coming up”. Portuguese pharmaceutical company Hovione, which has a contract manufacturing site in Cork that employs more than 200 people, has also been looking at innovative ways of developing talent. “We’re quite a small company so we’re not going to have a huge internal mentoring or graduate recruitment programme” said human resources director Mary Hennessy. “We’ve tried to align with international programmes where we can facilitate one or two graduates.” INOV Contacto, is an EU-funded scheme that enables young Portuguese’s workers to work abroad for six months as interns in multinational companies. In Hovione’s case, the candidates typically have a master’s degree or a PHD in chemistry. “At the end of the placement it’s up to us if we want to offer a full-time position” said Hennessy. “Both of the participants so far have stayed with us and relocated to Cork as process engineers”. The company also participates in the Ibec Global Graduates Programme, taking on two people through this route each year. The 12 month programme involves six months working with the Cork team and six months based in one of the other Hovione sites in Lisbon, New Jersey or Macau. The company has gone on to hire six graduates through this programme. Read Article  

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Invest in talent to find future leaders

Feb 18, 2018

The trend for school-leavers to prefer to automatically opt for college has resulted in a shortage of skilled workers in certain fields, warns Dr Paul Downing, Hovione general manager. “The single biggest challenge we have experienced is in the area of skills,” says Mr Downing. He says it’s believed the low number of skilled workers such as electricians, fitters, quality control analysts, instrument technicians as well as automation technicians, is a result of the fall-off in popularity of traditional Apprenticeship programmes and increased parental pressure on school-leavers to earn a degree. Yet, he points out, the traditional apprenticeship route offers all participants potentially excellent careers. "We would like to see more emphasis placed by second-level career guidance teachers on the option of apprenticeships in all of the different trades," he said, adding that the issue has become a "significant" problem in recent years. The focus of the Hovione pharmaceutical plant in Cork, at which just under 200 people are employed, is Contract Manufacturing, offering both drug substance and particle engineering capabilities and services. "Because of the shortage we are having to hire contract resources instead of being able to employ permanent staff members," Dr Downing explained. "We are trying to source laboratory technicians for example, who have become skilled through an Apprenticeship route rather than through a third level degree but it is difficult to find such personnel.   Read the full article

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Hovione keeps a keen focus on developing its talent pool

Jul 07, 2017

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