Press Room

Press Clipping / Oct 02, 2020

Pharma manufacturer Hovione announces 48 new jobs for Cork

Silicon Republic, October 2, 2020

Over the coming months, Hovione will be hiring for positions in quality control, quality analysis, warehouse operations and production operations.

Hovione, a contract pharmaceutical manufacturing and particle engineering company, has announced 48 new jobs for its base in Cork.

The expansion follows a partnership agreement between Hovione and biopharma company Ligand to ramp up production of Captisol, a product that can improve the solubility and stability of drugs. Captisol is used in the Covid-19 treatment Veklury, which is produced by US pharma company Gilead.

New hires will be based at Hovione’s site in Ringaskiddy, Co Cork, which has been in operation for more than 10 years. It was acquired from Pfizer in 2009 and currently employs around 200 people.

According to the company’s talent acquisition specialist, Michelle Ahern, the vacancies will span quality control, quality assurance, process engineering, project management, engineering, warehouse operations and production operations. Recruitment for the roles is underway and the team plan to fill them by the end of 2020.

Founded in Portugal in 1959 by Diane and Ivan Villax, Hovione helps to bring new and off-patent drugs to market. The pharma manufacturing company has 1,600 staff members around the world, with facilities in the US, Ireland, China, Portugal, India, Japan, Switzerland and Hong Kong.

Jean-Luc Herbeaux, COO of Hovione, said that increased demand for Veklury has meant that Hovione will soon be producing in a month the amount of Captisol it normally produces in a year.

“This sudden spike in demand has required unique mobilisation efforts across the Hovione network to secure additional raw-material supply, execute major capital-expenditure projects at our sites, maximise operational efficiency, hire additional talent and identify external partners to expand our overall capacity,” he said.

Ligand’s president and COO, Matt Foehr, added that Captisol is a “critical component for a number of life-saving medicines”.

Hovione Cork’s general manager, Paul Downing, said that the opportunities are for people “who want to join a fast-paced, dynamic, empowering, diverse, inclusive and exciting organisation”.

To learn more about working at Hovione, visit the company’s careers portal here.

 

Read the article at siliconrepublic.com

 

 

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