CDMO PharmaBlock purchases Chinese facility to meet increasing demand
The contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), which provides chemistry product and other services through the R&D process, has acquired a good manufacturing practice (GMP) compliant manufacturing facility from Porton Pharma Solutions Ltd.
The 1,436,000 square foot site is located in a State-level chemical industry park in Shangyu, Zhejiang Province. Operating as a multi-purpose GMP compliant facility since December 2015, the facility includes reactors from 300L to 6300L, with more than 180m3 of combined reactor volume.
“PharmaBlock has a unique and robust business model to support drug R&D from the very beginning of discovery all the way to commercialization,” explained Dr. Minmin Yang, Chairman of PharmaBlock.
“When the molecule advances into preclinical and clinical stages, demand quantities increase and CMC departments care about timeline, cost, compliance, and sustainable supply capabilities,” said Yang.
According to the company, the site has delivered more than 100 non-GMP and GMP intermediates from Phase I to commercial, with production more than 150 MT since January 2016. Also in 2016, the CDMO acquired Shangdong Diai Biotechnology as its first pilot plant and manufacturing site.
“Many of clients still will turn to PharmaBlock for process R&D services and bulk-scale production, because we can start quickly with accumulated knowledge and experience of the building blocks, and we even carry out process development in advance if we sense a larger demand of the products,” Yang told us.
Looking long-term
The company reported that its half-year revenue in 2018 increased 72.83% to $31.94m. It attributes the growth to an increasing amount of development and manufacturing projects.
As many of its 41,000 building blocks have been applied in clinical stages, and, according to the company, demand for building blocks and advanced intermediates is increasing from grams to kilograms to metric tons.
Over the past two years, the company has delivered around 2,000 projects of kilo-scale and above.
“Everything we do, including investing in new technologies and expanding the cGMP capacity is because we know that’s something we need to do to support clients in [the] long term,” explained Yang.
As part of this, the company announced earlier this month the appointment of a new CTO, Dr. Shijie Zhang who joins the CDMO from Agios Pharmaceuticals.
The company also has purchased another 330,000 square feet of land for a new Discovery and Process R&D Center at its site in Nanjing, China.
In the US, PharmaBlock has completed Phase I of its Process R&D Center site in Philadelphia Suburbs with the 7,000 square foot facility now in operation.
