CordenPharma Upgrades Peptide Production Manufacturing Plant

CordenPharma increased commercial peptide production capacity with newly upgraded facilities at CordenPharma Colorado, the largest solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS) manufacturing facility worldwide, according to the company.

CordenPharma successfully completed a series of upgrades and modernizations to the facility which have increased the efficiency and throughput of SPPS peptide production, allowing for increased capacity to service current and future customers across a growing pharmaceutical innovator base.

The capital expenditure initiative includes: Upgrades to existing 10,000 L reactor volume with a batch size exceeding 400 kg (> 35 amino acids), and a yearly capacity of greater than 2 metric tons of peptide; a 50% increase in downstream HPLC purification capacity; automation upgrades that allow a reduction in overall cycle time, greater scale-up consistency, and the elimination of human error; implementation of PAT for amino acid identification to avoid errors in peptide sequence, and ready-to-use process intensification with continuous washing and reaction monitoring and modernization of critical infrastructure for increased efficiency of solvent delivery (> 150,000 L) and effluent removal, including the strategic alignment of the deprotection (up to 20,000 L capacity), cleavage and isolation of crude peptide with the increased SPPS reactor capacity

CordenPharma Colorado is also expanding its team of experts to accommodate the overall capacity increase and resulting project demand. The company expects to add another 60 employees, and additional staff as needed, to its existing workforce of more than 500 employees.

As a continuation of CordenPharma’s 2023 investment strategy across all technology platforms including peptides, the updates of the SPPS peptide capacity complements CordenPharma’s  end-to-end service offerings with fully-integrated sterile injectable capabilities in CordenPharma Caponago (IT), including recently-expanded LNP Formulation and Fill & Finish capacity.

Michael Quirmbach, CordenPharma’s CEO said, “This expansion marks another milestone for CordenPharma, cementing our position as the leading large-scale Peptide CDMO partner to the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. Under the leadership of Brian McCudden, I am very proud of our team in Colorado for their great implementation of this challenging project on time and within budget.”