French plant transfers to Vectura Group as Aenova's lease ends
Contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) Aenova inked a lease on SkyePharma’s tablet production site in Lyon, France back in 2011, and two years later renewed the contract.
But the lease expired last week and the facility has transferred back to its owners, Vectura Group who only last month completed its $620m acquisition of fellow respiratory drugmaker SkyePharma.
“We are very pleased that the Lyon facility returns to the Group at this exciting time,” said Vectura’s EVP of Oral Business, David Lescuyer.
“We have a strong high quality base with the return of the Facility and we are confident of growing the business and creating future value by working with existing and new partners and leveraging our proven innovation and technology.”
The site itself makes seven of Vectura/SkyePharma’s oral products based on the firm’s proprietary delivery technologies.
It was also an access to such complex tableting technologies for Aenova which said it intended to offer the excess capacity to bolster its solid dosage form capacity in Europe back in 2011.
Whether any existing contracts will continue at Lyon now Aenova has left is unknown, but since it began leasing the plant the firm has upped its own internal manufacturing network through various mergers and acquisitions.
In October 2012, the CDMO took over Germany’s Temmler Group, which added seven production sites in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Ireland.
And the following year the firm increased its network from eight to 21 sites through the acquisition of Haupt Pharma.
