Hovione has installed a new large-scale spray drying unit in Loures, Portugal. This new unit is specifically designed to handle high potency APIs and use a wide variety of organic solvent systems. The unit will be installed in compliance with Quality and Safety Standards. 
 
Spray drying is used in numerous pharmaceutical applications and is often a used to enable poorly soluble oral drugs, to isolate biopharmaceuticals and for the production of inhalable dry powder formulations.
 
This additional commercial unit is the first phase of an expansion program designed to increase its range of offerings and to expand capacity.The new large-scale commercial facility will be operational by March 2016.
 
Dave Hoffman, vice president of sales and business development, said, “The new unit has all state-of-the-art technological developments and, more importantly, unique features from an accumulated knowledge of more than 10 years of experience in commercial spray drying.”
 
“We installed this new spray dryer in response to growing customer demand for the technology. Hovione’s leading position in spray drying is built on the experience of over 200 development programs.  Thanks to our Development by Design approach we can develop a process and scale it up to a commercial batch size in a matter of weeks using a minimum quantity of API,” said Filipe Gaspar, vice president of R&D.