Drug development firm CatSci has secured £4.5 million of investment from ‘alternative lender’ Boost & Co. This is described as a continuation of the Cardiff-based firm’s £3 million investment, which was started in 2021.

CatSci will use the funding to install new equipment and expand its laboratories by adding capabilities in chemical and analytical development, material science, product formulation and GMP analytical testing in both Cardiff and London. Some will be used to refinance its existing debt.

Lonza has completed an expansion at its API manufacturing site at Nansha, China, as part of its recent investment to expand mid-scale capacity there. This focused on extending the capabilities and capacity of development laboratories and kilo-scale cGMP manufacturing laboratories for clinical supply of HPAPIs.

Sinocompound Catalysts, a supplier of advanced homogeneous catalysts and ligands based in Zhangjiagang, China, has announced production of QPhos in kilogram quantities. Hitherto, the company said, its use in process development and scale-up has been hindered by the lack of commercial-scale capacity, despite its huge potential.

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.