CordenPharma said it is investing €3.7 million in the manufacturing site infrastructure of its CordenPharma Switzerland facility, located in Liestal, Switzerland. The investment will include an expansion of the square footage dedicated to small molecule, peptide and carbohydrate development services. In addition, an approximately €2 million investment in new automated development and optimization equipment is currently being realized to facilitate development services and an extensive upgrading and expansion of analytical equipment, which has already been made partially available to the development chemists. The expanded lab space will also enable an increase in the overall headcount of development FTE’s available to work on customer projects, which will ultimately increase the capacity of the CordenPharma Switzerland facility in the small molecule, peptide and carbohydrate space.

A further feature of the facility investment is to expand and refurbish the current purification capabilities as well as the construction of a new mini-plant, intended to meet the growing market demands in the g to kg’s range at the scale of 1 – 70 liters. The new design, with movable and interchangeable equipment, will create a highly flexible manufacturing space geared towards meeting our customers’ wide ranging requirements and aggressive timelines.

The total investment will allow CordenPharma Switzerland to run an increasing number of early-phase projects in parallel, to both support its own pipeline development as well as that of other facilities within the integrated CordenPharma network of manufacturing facilities across Europe and the US.

“The expansion at our CordenPharma Switzerland site is part of an ongoing strategic initiative to invest in small molecule API manufacturing across our global network of facilities. The additional development FTE’s will enable us to service our existing and future customers more efficiently,” said Stephen Houldsworth, director, global small molecules and antibiotics platforms, CordenPharma International.

Juerg Burger, managing director, CordenPharma Switzerland, said, “The introduction of this new mini-plant will enable us to run small-scale batches for our customers, while at the same time demonstrating the routes readiness for further scale-up and addressing their material requirements for early-phase clinical stages.”