PHARMA SPECIAL
Hovione has completed a $ 100 million investment cycle at its New Jersey site
Drug product focus
Hovione announced during the show that it has completed an initial $ 100 million investment phase in the expansion of its manufacturing footprint in East Windsor, New Jersey. The company was one of the first European CDMOs to set up in the US back in 2002.
CEO Jean-Luc Herbeaux said that when he took over the role four years ago, Hovione’ s footprint in the US was limited and the site was reaching capacity limitations.“ I’ m a strong believer in being close to the end market and the USA is the largest market in the world,” he said. Hovione therefore started looking around.
Based largely on the customers being in New Jersey, it decided to stay there and has since acquired buildings and land to accommodate long-term expansion. Like all five sites in its global network it is intended to be an autonomous, fully integrated‘ one-site stop’; Hovione does not believe in moving products between its sites like some CDMOs do
The initial phase includes a 2,900 m 2 building that will house two size-3 spray dryers for amorphous solid dispersions, the first of which will start up in Q 2
2026. Hovione claims to be the world leader in spray drying and this will double its US capacity, giving it 15 % of all installed capacity there. It has also acquired an adjacent 11,600 m 2 greenfield plot for large-scale production, including continuous and batch tabletting, from 2028.
The company has also been investing about € 200 million in a new 42-hectare site at Seixal, near its original Loures site in Portugal. This should be onstream by 2027 and will also feature spray drying and tableting. Further expansions are ongoing at Loures and at Cork, Ireland.
The Almac Group is currently completing a $ 500 million investment cycle across the business. In APIs, it has added 4,000L to 1,000L reactor capacities at Craigavon, Northern Ireland; in the US, it is active in clinical packaging, clinical services and analytical services, not drug substance.
“ Drug product is doing particularly well, it’ s less affected by tariffs and the regulatory impact of change than APIs,” noted Brian Shaughnessy, the company’ s new head of business development.
Almac has grown steadily over the years and is expected to see its biggest year yet in the current fiscal year, driven mainly by later-stage demand. It is active in peptides but at kilo-scale. Radiopharmaceuticals are an area where Almac has deep expertise and peptides can be used as precursors. Shaughnessy has seen a lot of funding and deals in this field of late.
Thermo Fisher Scientific has similarly invested in a third sterile drug product filling line in the US at Ridgefield, New Jersey. All of the firm’ s US sites have further expansion plans, specifically in prefilled syringes, confirmed Christy Eatmon, global SME in sterile drug products. The company is also investing in its European sites.
GLP-1s are certainly a key driver to these expansions, Eatmon said, though there is growth in all areas despite cutbacks in biotech funding. Thermo Fisher is also seeing increasing interest in end-to-end services from small biotechs, despite being probably the largest pharmaceutical CDMO.
Finally, Curia revealed immediately after the show that it had completed a $ 4 million investment to upgrade its two API aseptic suites in Valladolid, Spain, in line with the latest EU GMP Annex 1 standards and reinforces. The bulk of the investment went into equipment updates, notably the installation of new isolators.
NOV / DEC 2025 SPECCHEMONLINE. COM
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