Aesica Plans Inhalation Expansion

Aesica plans to increase its range of inhalation services and products in development, with a new Lead Technical Centre in Nottingham in the cards. The company has hired skilled staff in this area, worked on commercial development of several inhalation technologies, and is actively partnering with innovative companies and universities to discover and engineer new technologies for commercial applications.

Aesica currently has two new development technologies available to clients, including spray drying techniques delivered through a partnership with Upperton, and a powder filling technology delivered through 3P’s Fill2Weight.

The company’s Nottingham site has more than five years of experience developing new generic inhalation products alongside many NCEs for trial. Aesica is increasingly looking to work with clients over the longer term and is concentrating on taking new drug targets through to commercial stage, with the ability to switch easily between initial nebulized products, which permit for low-cost entry to early clinical trials, and dry powder inhalers for use in later clinical trials.

Aesica’s management contends that the push into inhalation services responds to client demands for CDMOs to offer a wider range of development technologies, delivery expertise and the ability to take a project to commercialization. In addition, having a portfolio of non-IP-protected products, can enable a CDMO to work with clients on developing a formulation irrespective of delivery mechanism. Re-formulations of generic products is seen an area of strong growth.

Ian Lafferty, site director for Aesica Nottingham, commented, “Inhalation is a rapidly growing market with many U.S. companies looking to bring NCE production to Europe, whilst we also see a dramatic growth for products going into China and SE Asia, particularly amongst generic formulations. We have largely operated under the radar in terms of inhalation products despite the wealth of new technologies coming to market here and our intention is to take a lead in bringing products to market faster and developing the next generation of technologies through our Lead Technical Centre.”