October 24, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
MADISON, Wisc. – Somerset, N.J.-based Catalent Pharma Solutions, a third-party drug manufacturer, announced plans to expand its Wisconsin facility and hire up to 100 new employees at the site over the next two years, the Wisconsin State Journal reported Oct. 22.
The company said it will create an additional 22,000 square feet to manufacturing, office and laboratory space, the Journal said. The expansion is expected to begin in November and has a price tag of about $34 million. An expansion of the Madison site was something that the company talked about a year ago. Reports last year indicated the company was looking to raise funds for an expansion to expand commercial capabilities. At the time Steve Leonard, Catalent’s senior vice president of global operations, told Outsourcing-Pharma the Madison site was built with expansion in mind. Leonard said the current space in Madison is “really almost full already—which is a great problem to have.”
The company’s Madison site, which opened in 2013 and currently has about 100,000 square-feet of space, is currently dedicated to early-phase products for pharmaceutical companies that have contracted with Catalent, including flexible cGMP and non-GMP production. The site features extensive single-use technologies and unidirectional flow, according to the company. There are currently 145 employees employed at the Madison site, the Journal said.
Catalent’s Madison site includes expanded mammalian cell line engineering and biomanufacturing capabilities utilizing single-use systems, according to the company website. Last year it was reported that much of the Madison space is occupied by a 1,000 liter single-use bioreactor. The addition of that bioreactor led to a “substantial double-digit increase in the commercial volumes” at the Madison site, BioPharma-Reporter said in a September report.
The company broke ground on the expansion last week. Brian Riley, general manager of the Madison site, told the Journal in an email that the site uses its “multiple proprietary technologies to develop and manufacture novel biopharmaceutical therapies.”
The expansion of the Madison site will certainly be welcome following a deal Catalent struck earlier this month with Moderna Therapeutics. Under that agreement, Catalent will support near-term clinical Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) messenger RNA (mRNA) manufacturing efforts for Phase I/II clinical studies of the company’s mRNA personalized cancer vaccines. Moderna, in collaboration with Merck , is advancing mRNA-based personalized cancer vaccines for patients across a spectrum of cancers. In support of the work, Catalent will support Moderna’s cGMP manufacturing of its mRNA personalized cancer vaccine clinical studies. Catalent will handle the manufacturing duties while Moderna builds out its own manufacturing facility in Norwood, Mass.
Shares of Catalent are down slightly this morning at $24.37.
