CSS opens £25m plant in Northern Ireland

Chemical Synthesis Services, which provides chemical development and analytical services for the drug industry, has officially opened a new, £25 million (€36 million), 80,000-square foot headquarters building and laboratories in Craigavon, Northern Ireland. The plant was opened by US Senator George Mitchell, who was visiting the region for informal talks with a number of political leaders. CSS was formed in October 2000 following the merger of QuChem and SynGal, both divisions of Northern Ireland's Galen Holdings. It is owned by Galen founder Allen McClay, who acquired three of the latter's divisions (CSS, Clinical Trial Services and Interactive Clinical Technologies) in a management buyout in 2001. The new facility comprises: dedicated current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) suites; five hydrogenation cells, each offering up to 20-litre capacity and operating at a pressure of 100 barg; eight 20-25 litre reactor suites for portable and mixed reactors; chromatography suites for kilogram scale biotage purification and preparative HPLC to hundreds-of-gram scale; state-of-the art R&D laboratories; instrument suites including nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectrometry; and stability chambers. The new investment, which will create 200 jobs over the next three to five years, was backed by the government-sponsored Invest Northern Ireland.