Spokeswoman for the firm Deborah Taylor told in-Pharmatechnologist.com the company expanded the site to meet increasing demand from local and multinational companies, driven by greater access to medicine in the region.
The Goa site will supply mostly generics clients, due to both growing global demand for un-branded medicines and India’s sizeable market share of generics manufacturing, said Taylor.
‘Generics+’
Yet generics manufacturers want more than basic formulations, Colorcon’s spokeswoman told us. As well as standard clear or pigmented immediate-release coatings, “you’ve also got increasing demand for the other types of technologies – things like the modified-release formulations.”
Push-Pull Osmotic Pump tablets, whose swelling polymers are produced at the Goa site, are one example of generics companies looking for “enhanced generics” or “generics-plus,” she said.
Osmotic tablets are double layered, with zero-order release (a reaction which happens when a surface becomes saturated). “The bottom layer has a polymer that swells when water enters the tablet, so it literally pushes out the [drug] through a laser hole in the top of the tablet.”
Fingerprint ID
The investment will continue to see the facility producing Colorcon’s full global range, with the same capabilities as before, but with equipment allowing scaled-up production. Taylor told us clients appreciate larger batch sizes as they allow reduced quality control testing.
Access to processing areas will be controlled by fingerprint technology, she added, stressing this was to make access faster for operators, and to ensure the safety of workers and visitors more reliably than via swipe cards.
The company had also invested in clean-in-place (CIP) technology, for cleaning equipment rooms without disassembly.
A recent report stated emerging excipient markets like China and India are set to outpace Western markets.