Lonza to invest US$ 500 Mn in biologic drugs plants for end-to-end services

In the latest move among drug manufacturing firms to establish dosage-form drug production services, Lonza says it is planning to invest $500 million to build a commercial-scale fill-and-finish facility for biologic drugs at a site in Stein, Switzerland.

Lonza is one of the major pharmaceutical services firms and a leader in contract manufacturing of active ingredients for biological drugs. It started its dosage-form drug business in Basel, Switzerland in 2016, working on injectable and infusible versions of antibodies, drug conjugates, peptides, and small molecules. Lonza has since added dosage-form manufacturing to its plants in Visp, Switzerland, and Guangzhou, China. It acquired the Stein site from Novartis in 2019.

But to this day, most of its dosage-form services have been for drugs in clinical trials. Lonza claims that the new facility will enable customers to provide commercially available quantities of both the active ingredients and dosage-form biologic drugs, which are typically injected or infused. “This new facility will enable us to gain additional market share and meet continued customer demand for commercial pharmaceutical product manufacturing,” Jean-Christophe Hivert, president of Lonza’s Biologics and Cell and Gene business, said in a press announcement.

The move to expand dosage-form services to injectable drugs follows Lonza’s sale last year to oral dose-form drug plants in Plormel, France, and Edinburgh, Scotland.

Several other contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) have combined dosage-form services as part of an overall strategy to serve drug manufacturers with everything from process research to finished product manufacturing. For example, another Swiss firm, Siegfried, acquired a fill-and-finish business in Irvine, California in 2012. In 2020 it acquired two dosage-form drug plants in Spain from Novartis.

Cordonpharma, another CDMO, recently acquired three oral dosage manufacturing operations from Vifor Pharma located in Switzerland and one in Portugal. And Catalent acquired a dose-form drug facility in Anagni, Italy, from Bristol Myers Squibb, a month before Lonza bought the Stein facility from Novartis.

Wayne Weiner, the US-based consultant, says that Lonza’s project “greatly expands their franchise in biologics (including cell and gene therapy) and allows the company to compete against major injection players including Thermo Fisher Scientific and Catalent.” The project validates an integrated services strategy that “continues to gain traction in the CDMO sector,” Weiner says.

Source: C&EN