Aseptic fill/finish firm Vetter is pumping over €300m ($335m) into its manufacturing sites over the next five years in order to add capacity and pre-empt pharma’s changing needs.
"We monitor our market with its forecasted developments on a continuous basis” managing director Thomas Otto told this publication.
"This is supplemented by a close cooperation and dialogue with our existing customers,” he added, including regularly exchanges about their expected future fill and finish demands. “Combining those two fields has majorly contributed to the decision to realize those investments in the upcoming years.”
And as to what the future is shaping up to be, Otto said his firm is seeing “continuous mergers and acquisitions, ever-more complex molecules with their corresponding manufacturing challenges, smaller product batch sizes, and increasing customer requests in the fields of flexibility,” shaping up the investments across Vetter’s network.
While he did not disclose the overall capacity expansion across Vetter’s two German and one US site, he did tell us that after the investment the contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) will have around 25% more cleanrooms.
The company is also building a centre for visual inspection and logistics at its Ravensburg West, Germany site, set to open in 2017 which will more than double its current capacity there
The news is the latest in a series of expansions for Vetter. Last year, a pre-clinical and clinical syringe filling unit was added at its Chicago site, while in 2013 the firm invested $100m across its network to cope with rising demand for biopharmaceutical products.