CDMO invests £6 million in pilot plant facility at UK site

Contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO), Sterling Pharma Solutions, is investing £6 million in its pilot plant facility at its UK site for the enhancement of scale-up and small to midscale commercial API manufacturing capabilities.

This expansion will increase the capacity of the pilot plant by a third, adding three new reactor trains at scales of 225 L, 500 L and 1,360 L. These enhancements will help the company meet the growing demand for API batch sizes in the 10–100 kg range and will complement its API full service offering and current scale-up capabilities.

As part of the investment, the 40-acre site in Dudley will also feature a range of new capabilities to expand the ability to handle potent compounds across a range of equipment scales.

“Over the last decade API manufacture has steadily started to move back to the west, as customers begin to look for partners who can offer reliability, high quality and the ability to handle increasingly complex products,” revealed Kevin Cook, CEO at Sterling Pharma Solutions. “This latest investment has been driven by demand for a full-service API development and manufacturing offering. More and more of our customers are interested in outsourcing the entire process and by adding more small-scale equipment to our facility we’ll be able to increase our capacity and cater for additional projects from proof of concept through to commercial manufacture.”

This expansion follows an investment in 2017 into the site’s milling, micronisation and solid form facility. Both investments form part of a strategic development plan totalling almost £12 million. The facilities are expected to be operational by mid-2018.