New York-based company, LBB Specialties, through its subsidiaries Charkit Chemical and American International Chemical (AIC), has entered a partnership with Meggle Excipients & Technology, a pharmaceutical excipients manufacturer based in Wasserburg, Germany.
Under the partnership, Charkit and AIC will share responsibility for sales, marketing and distribution in the US market of Meggle’s lactose-based excipients, used for direct compression and granulation tableting, powder preparations and dry powder inhalation.
Jay Lang, president of Charkit, commented that Meggle is “one of only a handful of manufacturers of pharma-grade lactose excipients in the world”, adding that its products are of ‘excellent’ quality.
Meggle’s Excipients & Technology business group produces pharmaceutical excipients for capsules, sachets, powder blends and dry powder inhalers and holds production facilities in Germany and Minnesota, US.
The partnership between Meggle and LBB began August 1, 2019.
Expanding in a booming market
The pharmaceutical excipients market in the US is currently worth an estimated $2.1bn (€1.9bn), and is projected to grow by 5.1% year-over-year over the next five years.
The rising uptake of biopharmaceuticals which require advanced formulation ingredients, as well as the increasing adoption of orphan drug products with multifunctional excipients, is expected to further boost the market’s growth in the foreseeable future.
Additionally, the patent expiration of several blockbuster drugs will open the possibility for the introduction of generics, such as in the case of Pfizer’s Lyrica (pregabalin) and the most recent example of Eli Lilly’s Alimta (pemetrexed), for which the patents expire in 2022, with Mylan’s generic drug product having already seen tentative approval.
