BUSINESS INSIGHTS, PHARMACY MARKET
PCI Pharma Services | March 20, 2023
PCI Pharma Services (PCI), a leading global contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), announced plans for a new 200,000-square-foot facility in Rockford, Illinois to enhance the organization’s capacity in injectable drug-device combination product assembly of both biologics and small molecules. Building on PCI’s leadership in this space with its Philadelphia Biotech Center of Excellence, the new facility is the second expansion building off the success in Philadelphia and will house over 20 dedicated customer suites with multiformat machines for the assembly and packaging of vials, pre-filled syringes, auto-injectors, and pen-cartridge combinations. This machinery can be used for the glucagon-like peptide 1 agonists (GLP-1) class of drugs prescribed to treat diabetes and obesity, as well as those needed for oncology treatment and autoimmune diseases.
PCI’s Rockford location will have extensive product testing capability, state-of-the art top-load cartoning technology, and industry leading injector and pen assembly equipment. Additional capabilities include on-site cold storage, high-speed vial labeling, assembly, and packaging of multiformat autoinjectors, serialization, testing, and drug product release.
“We see the tremendous impact that we can make with patients with this investment,” said Salim Haffar, CEO of PCI Pharma Services. “The need for injectable drug-delivery device combination product capacity and expertise is critical, and we are responding with a world-class facility to address the future demands of our global clients so they can focus on developing therapies to improve the lives of patients with serious chronic conditions.”
The $50 million investment in Rockford will amplify PCI’s specialty drug leadership presence in the Midwest, adding to clinical and commercial sterile fill-finish capabilities in Madison, Wisconsin. The new facility will provide a second hub within the U.S., expanding from PCI’s foundation in the Northeast, with Bedford, New Hampshire’s campus growth in aseptic processing. PCI also has sterile fill-finish capabilities at its Leon, Spain; San Diego, California; and Melbourne, Australia locations. The expansion in Rockford is expected to bring 250 jobs to the region in the next two years, with continued growth over three to five years. The site is expected to be fully operational in summer 2024.
“With this new facility, we will be able to serve all clients focused on injectable drug products including biologics with the equipment and capacity to make life-changing medicines,” said Gil Valadez, Senior Vice President, Commercial Packaging Technology, PCI Pharma Services. “We want to help our clients by managing the technical aspects of drug manufacturing, engineering, and delivery, so they can focus on what’s most important: delivering quality products to meet patient needs. That's what PCI is ultimately all about.”
About the Rockford, IL Facility
Rockford is the largest of PCI’s 30 locations across the U.S., European, and Asia Pacific regions, providing industry-leading services for the clinical and commercial packaging of a diverse portfolio of products and specialized delivery forms destined to reach more than 100 countries across the world. The gated secured facility is classified by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as Schedule 3. It features temperature and humidity control, an approved Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ) and offers TF1 and Uhlmann blistering, vibratory and slat filler bottling, powder filling, cartoning, carding, kitting and serialization capabilities. Warehouse storage includes freezer storage -15°C to -30°C and cold storage 2°C to 8°C.
About PCI Pharma Services
PCI is a leading global CDMO, providing clients with integrated end-to-end drug development, manufacturing and packaging capabilities that increase their products’ speed to market and opportunities for commercial success. PCI brings the proven experience that comes with more than 50 successful product launches each year and over five decades in the healthcare services business. We currently have 30 sites across seven countries (Australia, Canada, U.S., Ireland, Wales, Germany and Spain) and over 5,000 employees that work to bring life-changing therapies to patients. Leading technology and continued investment enable us to address global drug development needs throughout the entire product life cycle – from manufacturing capabilities through the clinical trial supply chain and into commercialization. Our clients view us as an extension of their business and a collaborative partner with the shared goal of improving patients’ lives.
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PHARMA TECH
PR Newswire | May 26, 2023
Centrient Pharmaceuticals ("Centrient"), the global business-to-business leader in sustainable antibiotics, next-generation statins and anti-fungals, and Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE: DNA), which is building the leading platform for cell programming and biosecurity, today announced they are expanding their existing partnership aimed at broadening Centrient's portfolio of environmentally friendly active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), following the success of previous work together.
Ginkgo's ongoing partnership with Centrient focuses on improving the sustainability of fermentation and enzymatic syntheses of beta-lactam antibiotic APIs. In the first phase of this project, Ginkgo delivered an enzyme with significantly improved efficiency, reducing the environmental footprint of enzymatic production of amoxicillin and cephalexin APIs. These semi-synthetic beta-lactam antibiotics are widely prescribed to both children and adults and are on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. Centrient aims to build on these improvements through ongoing strain projects on Ginkgo's platform which focus on reducing carbon emissions and waste production compared to traditional chemical routes.
"Our partnership with Ginkgo is fully aligned with our main purpose: to improve lives through innovative and sustainable manufacturing of medicines," said Jorge Gil-Martinez, Chief Scientific Officer at Centrient. "The initial success of this collaboration has led us to expand our joint efforts to design new ways of producing essential medicines, minimizing the environmental impact of antibiotic manufacturing. Moreover, as we design and execute our Open Innovation business model, this strategic collaboration creates synergies to accelerate the diversification of our portfolio, a strategic pillar for the future of our company. Access to external disruptive technologies, focusing on enzymes and fermentation, contributes to our vision to be a diversified and integrated partner of choice for generic medicines."
"Our partnership with Centrient, which began in 2021, underscores Ginkgo's commitment to supporting biopharma companies in bringing much-needed innovation to the field," said Kevin Madden, SVP of Platform Commercialization at Ginkgo Bioworks. "We are inspired by the early success we've already seen in our partnership and look forward to expanding our joint efforts to ultimately support better patient outcomes."
About Centrient Pharmaceuticals
Centrient Pharmaceuticals is the global business-to-business leader in sustainable, enzymatic antibiotics, next-generation statins, and anti-fungals. We are a pharmaceutical company with a clear Purpose: to improve lives through innovative and sustainable manufacturing of medicines - saving the lives of millions of people around the world annually.
Regarding our portfolio, we produce and sell intermediates and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), as well as finished dosage forms (FDFs). Our world-leading proprietary enzymatic technology PureActives® ensures an unmatched eco-friendly production process for our high-quality products. Driven by our Purpose and Sustainability through our ESG vision, we aim to create value for Centrient and our stakeholders. Centrient is a Board Member of the AMR Industry Alliance and a long-time advocate for industry responsibility in manufacturing.
Founded 150 years ago as the 'Nederlandsche Gist- en Spiritusfabriek', our company was known as Gist Brocades and more recently DSM Sinochem Pharmaceuticals. Headquartered in Rotterdam (Netherlands), we have production facilities and sales offices in China, India, the Netherlands, Spain, the United States and Mexico. Centrient Pharmaceuticals is owned by Bain Capital Private Equity, a leading global private investment firm.
About Ginkgo Bioworks
Ginkgo Bioworks is the leading horizontal platform for cell programming, providing flexible, end-to-end services that solve challenges for organizations across diverse markets, from food and agriculture to pharmaceuticals to industrial and specialty chemicals. Ginkgo's biosecurity and public health unit, Concentric by Ginkgo, is building global infrastructure for biosecurity to empower governments, communities, and public health leaders to prevent, detect and respond to a wide variety of biological threats.
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PHARMACY MARKET
Businesswire | May 23, 2023
Exscientia plc announced two abstracts for oral and poster presentation, as well as the closing keynote to be delivered at the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) Europe Conference and Exhibition being held May 22-26, 2023, in Brussels, Belgium. These presentations highlight Exscientia’s recent advancements in technology, including the development of computer-aided biology (CAB) approaches, encompassing design of experiments (DoE) and automation for biochemical assay optimisation. The SLAS Conference is Europe’s premiere venue for industry, government and academic researchers, developers and providers of laboratory automation technology innovation.
“At Exscientia, our mission is to encode and automate drug discovery. We believe that within this decade the design of all new drug candidates will be augmented with AI. I am delighted to showcase at SLAS Europe how our recent technology advances enable and drive our projects,” said Dr Garry Pairaudeau, Chief Technology Officer at Exscientia. Integrating laboratory automation of synthesis and screening with its AI-driven computational design platform is the logical next step for the company. “This will facilitate the next transformation in speed and productivity, as we aim to bring better medicines to patients faster. We’re looking forward to opening our purpose-built automation studio in Oxfordshire, U.K., later in 2023.”
The company’s presentation at SLAS will demonstrate how far along Exscientia is in automating the drug discovery processes. “We believe automation has the potential to radically improve the timely creation of high-quality drug candidates, so that future patients may benefit from innovative science faster,” Pairaudeau stated.
Closing Keynote Presentation
Title: The future of AI-enabled drug discovery
Room/Location: Plenary Theater Date/Time: Thursday, May 25 / 16:30 – 17:30 PM CET
This presentation will highlight Exscientia’s distinct approach to molecular design, using an end-to-end patient centric, AI-enabled platform, which has led the way in the precision design of AI-generated molecules resulting in the first AI-designed compounds to enter clinical trials. To reach Exscientia's goal of fully encoding and automating drug discovery, the company is assembling an automated physical laboratory alongside its suite of sophisticated computational design tools, methods and scalable engineering platform. This presentation will highlight Exscientia's current progress in the automation field and the critical steps needed in the implementation of automated, digital laboratories.
Abstracts Accepted for Presentation
Oral Presentation Title: Computer-aided biology: DoE solutions Track: Frontiers in Technology Room/Location: 231 Date/Time: Thursday, May 25 / 15:30 – 16:00 PM CET
Exscientia is building an automated ecosystem of chemistry, biology and compound management, including developing a pipeline of fully automated biochemical assays from assay development onwards. This presentation highlights how CAB has been leveraged to achieve this pipeline, combining DoE (a statistical methodology) with automation to rapidly determine optimum conditions to run assays efficiently through analysis of multi-factorial experimental results. Utilising CAB also allows Exscientia to increase capacity and efficiency across FTEs, time and reagents required to run assays, increase assay robustness and investigate areas of biology not normally studied.
Poster Title: Improving assay optimisation and pharmacological sensitivity of a nuclease by employing a computer-aided biology approach
Session/Track: Session A; Frontiers in Technology Abstract Number: 1034-A
Date/Time: Wednesday, May 24 / 13:30 – 14:30 PM
Exscientia researchers demonstrated the practical use of CAB to simultaneously improve an assay’s performance and reduce the reagent requirement, cost and labour for assay development. This presentation highlights the application of CAB to optimise the buffer of a nuclease assay, resulting in a 15-fold enhanced assay signal in low salt buffer conditions, alongside over a three-fold decrease in protein requirement and reduced assay development cycle times. The low salt requirement is a previously unforeseen result from CAB use which would have not been predicted from the literature. This highlights the potential for technology to improve assay performance in ways a human alone would not have been able to predict.
About Exscientia
Exscientia is an AI-driven precision medicine company committed to discovering, designing and developing the best possible drugs in the fastest and most effective manner. Exscientia developed the first-ever functional precision oncology platform to successfully guide treatment selection and improve patient outcomes in a prospective interventional clinical study, as well as to progress AI-designed small molecules into the clinical setting. Our internal pipeline is focused on leveraging our precision medicine platform in oncology, while our partnered pipeline broadens our approach to other therapeutic areas. By pioneering a new approach to medicine creation, we believe the best ideas of science can rapidly become the best medicines for patients.
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