The new 24,000 square-feet facility is expected to provide clinical supply services to clients in early stages of clinical development, supporting the company’s contract development and manufacturing services (CDMO) offering.
The site’s operations will include product packaging, labeling, storage, and distribution, as well as drug returns and destruction, while the facility will also have stability chambers.
According to Catalent, the facility will be located less than a mile from the company’s early-phase oral drug product development site in California, US, and it is expected to initiate operations in the summer of 2020.
By integrating its CDMO offering, Catalent aims to minimize the overall project risks and accelerate the development of its customers’ drug products into clinical trials.
Paul Hegwood, president of Catalent’s clinical supply services, commented that the investment answers the clients’ needs for greater flexibility and expanded support for early-phase studies.
Catalent’s existing site in San Diego is one of the company’s three facilities in oral dose early-phase development. The other two sites are located in Somerset, New Jersey, and Nottingham, UK, which provide formulation, analytical, and manufacturing services for orally delivered small molecules at the preclinical and clinical stage.
The new facility adds to Catalent’s set of assets in the US, UK, Germany, Singapore, Japan and China, in which the company has made significant investments since the beginning of the year.
In April, Catalent opened a 30,000-square-foot clinical supply facility in Shanghai, China, after an investment of $2.5m (€2.27m) was announced late last year.
At the time, a spokesperson for Catalent told us that the company was expanding services to meet the growing clinical supply needs of the Asia-Pacific region.
Also this year, the company announced an investment of $40m to increase its capacity for controlled-release capsules and tablets manufacture, as well as a $5m investment to increase the hot melt extrusion capabilities at its site in Somerset.
