WuXi STA opens manufacturing line with 10m unit capacity
WuXi STA, a subsidiary of WuXi Apptec, announced that a parenteral formulation manufacturing line had been added to its drug product site in Wuxi city, China. The addition to its facility marks the second time this year that the company has added a manufacturing line for clinical and commercial drug product manufacturing.
The new line possesses a fully automatic vial loading/unloading system, and has the annual capacity to produce 10 million units. The line has a filling speed of 200 vials per minute.
WuXi STA’s new filling line adds significantly to the capacity provided by the first line, which was added in January 2022. The first line has a capacity of 2 million units per year.
In terms of the facility housing the line, the company stated that it possesses vial cleaning, drying, filling, and freeze-dying technology, with the entire process being wholly automated in the isolator. The facility is located in Jiangsu, alongside a larger campus that is designed to integrate drug product R&D and manufacture of both oral and injectable formulations.
The company does not plan to stop with the two lines, outlining that a high potency parenteral manufacturing line is expected to begin operations in the third quarter of 2023, as part of the same announcement. Outside of China, WuXi STA will add additional development and manufacturing services once its new site in the US, located in Delaware, is completed in 2025.
Personalized medicine
The day after opening the manufacturing line, the Chinese firm announced its partnership with US firm, Multiply Labs, for the development of automated manufacturing systems to produce personalized drugs for patients.
As part of the collaboration, the latter company has already deployed a robotic system in WuXi STA’s facilities within Wuxi city to improve the efficiency of manufacturing solid oral dosage forms. The formulations include capsules containing personalized dosage strengths of a single active pharmaceutical ingredient (API), as well as capsules containing a personalized combination of multiple APIs and their formulations.
According to the partners, they are aiming to address the challenge of creating personalized dosing for patients, which is difficult to achieve through traditional manufacturing due to the large batch process usually adopted.
The robotic technology is able to address this by being designed to handle personalized deposition for most common formulations, including powders, powder blends, granules, beads, and minitabs.
