Press Room

Press Clipping / Nov 12, 2018

Hovione bulks up, with a twist

C&EN, November 12, 2018

Guy Villax R&D Center in Portugal, Pharmaceutical Services Continuous Tableting | Hovione

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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The CDMO is preparing for its New Jersey facility to become fully operational this year. Hovione’s multimillion-dollar investment in expanding its East Windsor, NJ manufacturing site is quickly coming to fruition. Contract Pharma will be visiting the site later in April 2026 to provide a unique overview of what’s new. As a preview, the Contract Pharma team met with Hovione at the Drug, Chemical & Associated Technologies Association (DCAT) Week. David Basile, Vice President of Technical Operations—Americas, spoke at the opening Member Company Announcement Forum on March 23, 2026. In this interview, Basile expands on his remarks at the Announcement Forum. As he explains, Hovione is concentrating not only on New Jersey, but also on facilities in Ireland and Portugal. Contract Pharma: Good manufacturing practice (GMP) operations will soon be fully operational at the New Jersey facility. How has Hovione progressed through this process since the initial investment cycle was announced last fall—or even prior? David Basile: It’s been a really great journey and evolution over the last two to three years, conceiving the plan to grow our U.S. footprint. It was one of the reasons I came aboard with Hovione, to grow that footprint and build our commercial manufacturing prowess in the States. In New Jersey, we had originated [the site] as a tech transfer center. [But] we wanted to grow the organization to be more equivalent with our Portugal and Ireland sites, to do more large-scale manufacturing. So, this is part of that journey. And that’s not just bricks-and-mortar and machinery. It’s been people, talent, partnerships with clients, supporting functions such as QC [quality control] and analytical development. We’re growing our R&D teams as well. It’s a comprehensive approach to systems, people, and processes. CP: At the Member Company Announcement Forum, you ran through some of the major technical specifications of the NJ expansion. Can you talk about a few of the highlights and their capabilities? Basile: This year we’ll be starting up two PSD-3 scale spray dryers. This is a useful scale of machinery for our clients. It plays nicely between the PSD-2 and PSD-4 scales that we have elsewhere in the network. I’d say it’s medium-to-large scale capacity; we could do 30 metric tons annually out of this type of a unit. Product to product, that differs, but we do have products that put that kind of volume out in a PSD-3, so it’s not small-scale. Customers want to hear this because [they want to gain] efficiency with their batch size, and turnaround time. And when we campaign, we can really see significant throughput with this line up of new machinery and assets. The first machine that we will start up is a Hastelloy unit, which is unique. We took a pause [in the construction timeline] to make that upgrade, as we had a client that needed this configuration. There are additional clients that are interested in it too, because you can do acidic solutions and more aggressive kinds of formulations as well as solvent-based formulations. So that’s a unique element of that first machine. The second machine is being qualified later this year. Kind of a twin, but this one is standard 316 stainless steel.  CP: When a company brings a new or expanded facility online, new personnel often accompanies the new tech. What is the workforce addition that you expect, and what are the challenges of retaining top talent? Basile: In preparation for commissioning and startup of this new equipment, we’ve already ramped our headcount up, to be ready for GMP launch. We’ve added roughly 20 employees in preparation for this first machine to go [live]. Over the next 18-plus months, we could see something on a similar scale, getting us up to that 40–50 headcount range for that facility once it’s fully operational—and more later on in 2028, when we bring in the CDC [continuous direct compression] Flex unit. That’s what’s really going to be transformative about this new facility: that integrated offering coming to life. CP: Even if the NJ facility is top of mind right now, let’s also touch on some of your plans in Europe. What is your vision for expanding in Europe in the next two to three years? Basile: Ideally, Hovione’s aim is to build an equivalent manufacturing network, where clients can go to any site across the globe and get a similar breadth and scale of offering. We’re doing that now in Ireland, expanding our PSD-4 scale spray drying. One unit was recently installed. Late last year, it went live. 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Because we can easily scale the number of fingers. When customers say, “we need more capacity,” we have the design on the table ready to go. We know how to execute, we know how to build and implement our technology platforms in a short timeframe. Deployment timeframes are truly becoming more and more relevant to our clients. CP: From last year’s DCAT Week to this year’s, what conversations are you having with industry colleagues about ever-changing geopolitics? Basile: We’re seeing that local, regional manufacturing capacity is vital. The concept of U.S. for U.S. and China for China seems to be a common theme that our clients are talking about. We happen to have an edge, as we [have already] started our journey of expanding our domestic U.S. capacity. So I think that’s a crucial piece to the puzzle, having dual-sided Atlantic manufacturing operations. The traditional global supply chain model is being challenged. 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