CDMO Sterling Pharma Solutions has agreed to acquire Novartis’s 45-hectare Ringaskiddy campus near Cork, Ireland. Financial details of the sale, which is expected to close in Q4, 2022, have not been disclosed. All of the workforce will transfer to Sterling, bringing its global total to over 1,000.

The deal also includes an ongoing supply agreement for products Novartis has made at the site. The facilities include three API manufacturing buildings, plus facilities to support development and scale-up.  

The board and shareholders of Hovione have named Dr Jean-Luc Herbeaux (right) as CEO from 1 April. He had originally joined the firm as COO in May 2020, after multiple leadership positions at Evonik, where he last headed the Health Care business line.

Quotient Sciences, a UK-based firm that describes itself as a “drug development and manufacturing accelerator”, has integrated drug substance into its flagship Translational Pharmaceutics platform, uniting it with drug product and clinical testing activities within one organisation under a single project manager. This follows a year after the acquisition of the former Arcinova site at Alnwick.

Portuguese CDMO Hovione, whose key technical specialities include spray drying and particle engineering, has concluded a strategic partnership under which it will market and commercialise Zerion’s solubility enhancement technology platform, Dispersome. Zerion was spun out from the University of Copenhagen in 2019, following a decade of research.

Indian-based CDMO Piramal Pharma Solutions (PPS) is to invest about £55 million to expand two sites in the UK. It will expand its antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) capabilities at Grangemouth in Scotland and new API infrastructure at Morpeth in north-east England.

Italian CDMO Olon has completed a large-scale high containment production line (OEL < 1 mg/m³) at its Rodano site at a cost of about €10 million. This is part of a planned €27 million it will roll out over 2022-3 that is fully allocated to the expansion of further internal expertise and capacity of high containment production. The new line, which is already operative, enables Olon to produce HPAPIs in batches of 30-250 kg.

The US-based Green Chemistry division of the Minafin Group has formed a strategic partnership with Origin Materials of West Sacramento in California to industrialise speciality products based on Origin’s biobased, carbon-negative materials in the pharmaceutical, agricultural, cosmetics and personal care, and automotive industries. No further terms were disclosed.