Curia to expand US API capabilities

Curia has announced plans to invest about $35 million in order to expand commercial-scale API manufacturing capacity at its largest site in Rensselaer, New York, over the course of 18 months. This is the third significant announcement in the month since the former AMRI renamed itself.

The expansion will include new vessel capacities that more than double the site’s batch-size scaling and product output. It also features new product-handling for complex small molecules, notably oncology treatments, thus enabling Curia to address growing demand for HPAPIs, while also optimising energy use and enhancing environmental standards.

“Some of the life-saving products produced at Rensselaer are highly complex,” said chairman and CEO John Ratliff. “The engineering and technology advances we have designed for the site will enhance our flexibility, efficiency and scale, allowing us to meet our customers’ current and future complex manufacturing needs.”

AMRI adopted the name Curia, taken from a Latin word for ‘purposeful assembly’, from 12 July. It said at the time that this “reinforces the company’s strategic positioning as an end-to-end global CDMO, applying its scientific expertise and extensive capabilities from R&D through to commercial manufacturing to enable its pharmaceutical and biotechnology customers to advance important new products that improve lives”.

In the following few days, Curia acquired Integrity Bio, a formulation and fill-finish company headquartered in Camarillo, California, and LakePharma, a biologics drug discovery, clinical research, development and manufacturing firm with operations in California, Massachusetts and Texas. Terms were not disclosed in either deal, but they were both integral to the rebrand, reflecting a move beyond the traditional focus on small molecules.

Ratliff said that Integrity Bio was “a great fit with our growth strategy and our existing expertise, enhancing our biologics drug product formulation development as well as our fill-finish network”. Integrity also brings West Coast coverage to Curia’s largely East Coast presence. It has facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Burlington, Massachusetts; and Glasgow in Scotland.

LakePharma brought the technology platforms of cell-line development, bioexpression systems and viral vector production systems, plus relationships with 22 of the top 25 global biopharmaceutical companies. Its six facilities and 235 employees join Curia’s 21 sites and over 3,100 employees to offer end-to-end services.