The CHF70m (€54.6m) facility, which is already operational ahead of its official opening next month, houses corporate offices and a 6,400 sqm laboratory that will provide a range of pharmaceutical analysis services.
CEO Hansjorg Walther told Outsourcing-Pharma.com that, while the immediate benefit is extra capacity for long-term and follow-up stability analysis, the firm plans to roll out a number of new testing services at the site over the next few years.
“The new building’s infrastructure offers potential to broaden the service offering of Solvias. In the medium term we will be able to offer formulation development and analysis. We also plan to expand our existing capabilities for handling highly potent and highly active substances.”
Walther also suggested that having a broad range of analysis and manufacturing services under one roof offers improved in inter-departmental communication as well as giving Solvias the ability to adapt its staff capacity to the demands of specific projects.
“Beside this,” he continued “we have made considerable progress in case of sample management as we concentrated the sample management on one spot which enhances the logistics between different departments.”
The new lab and corporate facility will work in concert with Solvias’ chemical development centre in nearby Basel, which provides active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing to Phase IIa.
Pharma demand
Walther also set the new facility in terms of Solvias’ wider efforts to adapt its business to the changes in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.
“We are going to align our offer more strongly and in a more differentiated manner to the demands of large pharmaceutical companies as we see a good potential in this area.
He also predicted that integrated synthesis, analysis and solid-state characterisation services will also be of interest to small and mid-sized pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies "even if demand from such firms remains on a lower but stable level because of their financial situation.”