Roquette opens $25m US oral dosage innovation center

The $25m (€22.7m) US facility, known as the Pharmaceutical Innovation Center, is located near Philadelphia, in what Roquette referred to as the country’s Northeastern pharmaceutical corridor.

The center itself will be used as an advanced training and collaboration hub for pharmaceutical and nutraceutical manufacturers. The company stated that the focus of the center would be on optimizing patient experience with next-generation oral dosage forms.

In terms of what will be offered through the site, Roquette stated that expert training, troubleshooting, and scale-up advice would be the priorities.

Workshops will also be provided at the site, with the first wave of training topics set to be focused on selecting excipients for controlled release dosage forms, enhancing bioavailability, and formulating effective orally dispersible and chewable tablets.

There would also be seminars based on manufacturing topics, such as improving wet/dry granulation processes and strategic for continuous manufacturing.

As well as being training-focused, the site will be equipped with pharmaceutical processing, testing, and manufacturing equipment.

As a result, Roquette will offer partners the ability to use equipment including R&D continuous manufacturing simulator, compaction simulator, hot-melt extruder, advanced dissolution and particle size testing (laser diffraction), thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA) and modulated differential scanning calorimetry (mDSC) to refine and improve formulations.

The site also possesses granulation, blending and coating equipment, and liquid chromatography analysis capabilities.

Roquette also added that the opening of the innovation center would be enabled by the appointment of a team of research scientists and formulation experts, who would guide Roquette’s US and global pharma R&D going forward.

At the time of the facility’s announcement, the company had planned to create 30 jobs at the site, including 20 scientists. The 23,000-square-foot facility joins similar facilities that Roquette​ has established in France and in Singapore.

Paul Smaltz, head of pharma for Roquette, previously explained to Outsourcing-Pharma the role the US facility would play within its existing global infrastructure: “The US location will focus on innovation in oral dosage forms and APIs for nutraceuticals, which will complement the advanced research in biopharma applications that is being carried out in the Singapore facility, as well as the central R&D function in France. All three locations are ideally placed to better serve our customers globally, covering a wide variety of applications and supporting companies and formulators of all sizes.”