Mumbai: Piramal Enterprises Ltd said on Tuesday its pharma solutions division will invest $55 million in expanding manufacturing capacity of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) across sites in North America, Asia and UK.
Piramal Pharma Solutions, the contract manufacturing division of Piramal Enterprises Ltd, will invest part of the funds into the new state-of-the-art, multi-purpose plants to support the current pipeline of approximately 80 late stage programmes that the company is currently assisting its partners with at various global sites.
It will also expand capabilities for APIs with higher potency at its plant in Riverview, Michigan in the US, while augmenting early development capabilities out of Ennore, India through additions of good-manufacturing practices (GMP)-compliant kilo labs and a pilot plant.
A kilo lab is a facility for scale up of small scale—milligram and gram quantities—laboratory developed chemical processes to kilogram quantities.
To serve its European biotech customers better, the company will add early development capabilities in both, drug substance and drug product, out of its Morpeth, UK facility.
Support functions such as analytical capabilities, research and development (R&D) infrastructure, automation, and IT systems will also be expanded at all API sites through this investment, the company said in a release.
Piramal supports API development and manufacturing through an integrated model across its five sites in North America, Europe and Asia. API development activities including route scouting and process development are conducted at three units. These facilities are forward integrated with commercial API manufacturing units at Aurora in Canada, Ennore and Digwal in India, Morpeth in the UK and Riverview in the US.
“With these investments, we can now support the commercialisation of our pipeline of over 80 programs that are at Phase II or beyond, while allowing us additional capacity for future partnerships. There has been significant customer interest in our ‘integrated’ offerings, and we are pleased to have over 60 integrated programmes across all phases of drug development,” Vivek Sharma, chief executive officer, of Piramal Pharma Solutions, said.
On Tuesday, shares of Piramal Enterprises closed down 0.06% at Rs2,768.90 on the BSE, while benchmark Sensex index was up 0.24% at 31,924.41 points.