The Portuguese CDMO has announced plans to improve production capacity by bringing in commercial scale equipment for blending, tabletting and coating.

The new equipment will work alongside existing smaller scale equipment to offer customers a "one site shop" to take products through the development process to market.

The contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO), headquartered in Loures, Portugal, began its expansion project in 2016 and stated that this will continue for the next five years.

The first step of this process began with moving its development services to a 7,000 m² facility in Lisbon, where the company handles potent and highly potent compounds.

Frédéric Kahn, VP of marketing and sales at Hovione, explained, "Our customers now see drug product manufacturing at the site where they produce their drug product intermediate as a natural extension of the range of value-added services they expect from us. They want to keep their product in the same capable hands."

The CDMO announced that the capacity expansion would be completed alongside the qualification of its continuous tabletting line, which it expects to be completed by the end of 2018.

Hovione completed its continuous manufacturing installation at its New Jersey, US, site at the end of last year - after doubling the size of the development and manufacturing operations.

Read entire article