Quay adds Dedicated Ph III Packing and Distribution Capacity
The Welsh contract services firm has invested £100,000 to add dedicated packing capacity for late stage clinical trials at its facility Deeside and also hired extra staff. The new capacity has been approved by the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).
Quay said the new area gives it the flexibility to respond to client requirements for both bulk delivery of product and to meet increasing demands for just in time deliveries to support randomised and blinded studies.
CEO Maireadh Pedersen expanded on this, telling Outsourcing-pharma.com that: “This investment was made in response to increasing support for our current customers…They have worked with us through formulation development.
“We were able to do both [packing and distribution] before but the scale of what we could do was limited to Phase I/II. We can now support quite complex and larger Phase III trials."
Customer driven
Pedersen said the main drive for the investment was a request from an unnamed French pharmaceutical customer developing drugs for neurodegenerative disorders, whose lead candidate is set to enter larger, pan European studies.
But while this French client may have been the key prompt for the investment, Quay has also seen an increase in demand for late stage packaging and distribution services from other customers with drugs in development.
“As more of our clients are getting positive trial results and progressing through the clinical phases we are able to support them for longer. We work on many oncology products and these trials can require support for many years.
“For example, one product for which we are one of the clinical distributors has been supported by Quay for five years. For this product we are still supplying product to named patients all over the world with the product being requested, shipped and received by the patient/clinic within 24 hours of request.”
