Alcami exits European manufacture

Alcami has agreed to sell its pre-clinical and early stage API facility in Weert, Netherlands, to  MercachemSyncom. Terms were not disclosed. The site, founded in 1999 and originally known as Chemshop, was originally acquired by one of Alcami’s predecessors, Cambridge Major Laboratories.

CCO Chad Telgenhof described this as “another key step in the strategic development of Alcami’s service delivery platform, focusing investments across our network toward high-growth market segments”.  This takes the company out of European API manufacture, which is concentrated at Germantown, Wisconsin, but it will retain its European sales and business development team.

The deal follows on from other recent strategic changes by Alcami, most notably a $17 million investment announced in December to expand the sterile drug product development and manufacturing operations at North Charleson, South Carolina, by 560 m². This is expected to be completed in 2021 and to add 30 jobs. Alcami has also launched its new Alcami Biologics division, having been bought out by Madison Dearborn partners in 2019.

MercachemSyncom itself was created in 2017 by the merger of two firms with operations at Nijmegen and Groningen, Netherlands, and has since acquired another site at Prague, Czech Republic. The company, which describes itself as a mid-sized European drug discovery CRO, said that Weert will enable it to support larger-scale clinical API requirements and bring in solid-state research capabilities, complementing existing process research.

Since the merger, said managing director Frank Leemhuis, “our activities in early drug substance development have grown significantly; however, it is a real challenge to find experienced development chemists – both analytical and synthetic. With the addition of the Alcami Weert team, we have the perfect technical and cultural match.” Weert houses reactors with capacities from 10 to 1,000L and has capabilities in polymorph screening and salt selection studies, plus crystallisation process development at scale. More recently, it added a high-tech, high-throughput X-ray powder diffraction workflow.