CRO

Almac Doubles Drug Product Development Capacity with a New Non-GMP Facility

Almac is pleased to announce the expansion of our drug product Pharmaceutical Development services with the creation of a new non-GMP formulation development facility and two new analytical laboratories at our UK headquarters in Craigavon. The new facilities double our current pharmaceutical development capacity allowing us to meet the growing demand for our services, both from existing and new clients

The new non-GMP formulation development facility offers clients greater flexibility and speed in formulation and process development, creating an environment where development work can be progressed quickly and then easily transferred to the GMP environment at an appropriate stage. Although the new facility will be dedicated to non-GMP work, it mirrors all the technical capabilities of Almac's existing GMP pharmaceutical development facility, including high levels of control over environmental conditions as well as extending current capabilities in processing potent compounds with low OELs.

Whereas, the existing GMP facilities can support drug product manufacturing from phase I up to registration and commercial scale, the new non-GMP facility will primarily focus on lab-scale experiments, with batch sizes ranging from <1kg up to an expected maximum of 15 kg scale for most technologies.

John McQuaid, VP of Technical Operations explains "Our priority was to ensure we had good integration of all technologies in both the non-GMP and GMP facilities.  Duplicating equipment trains means that we can conduct non-GMP work efficiently and then transfer rapidly to GMP manufacturing for clinical and registration batches.  We are finding that demand for non-GMP process development work has increased as clients seek to better understand their processes in line with the principles of QbD. This type of work also creates large sample sets for analytical testing and multiple stability studies which is why it was also important that we doubled our analytical capacity in parallel."

The Almac Group provides a broad range of pharmaceutical services from R&D, biomarker discovery and development, API manufacture, formulation development, clinical trial supply and IXRS® technology (IVRS/IWRS), to commercial-scale manufacture. Almac provides services to more than 600 companies, including all the world leaders in the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors.

The company employs over 3,300 and is headquartered in Craigavon, Northern Ireland. Its North American Headquarters are in Souderton, Pennsylvania and the company also has sites at North Carolina and California.