Aesica Targets Developmen?t Services at Growing Inhalation Market, with Plans to Open a Lead Technical Centre

Aesica, the global contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO), has announced its intention to increase its range of inhalation services and products in development, with a new lead technical centre also envisaged in the near future.

A key part of this inhalation drive has been the company’s focus on the intake of skilled staff, coupled with the commercial development of several leading inhalation technologies and the company is actively partnering with other innovative companies and universities to discover and engineer new technologies for commercial applications.

Aesica currently has two new development technologies available to clients, including spray drying techniques delivered through a partnership with Upperton, and a powder filling technology delivered through 3P’s Fill2Weight.

The plan marks a systemic shift in the wider market with clients now looking for CDMOs to have a wider range of development technologies, delivery expertise and the ability to take a project right through to commercialisation.

Another key factor in the company’s growth within this market has been the adoption of non IP protected products, which enables Aesica to concentrate with the client on developing the right formulation irrespective of delivery mechanism.

These new technologies have provided a huge advantage to customers in terms of lowering costs, particularly for re-formulations of generic products, whereby the cost of set-up is highly prohibitive to new market entrants and this is forecast to be a rapidly expanding sector. Building on these successes Aesica is researching both internally and externally for new innovations in formulation technologies to complement its suite of services and it envisages opening a new inhalation lead technical centre by the end of 2014.

The Nottingham site currently has more than 5 years’ experience developing new generic inhalation products alongside many New Chemical Entities (NCE) for trial. Aesica is increasingly looking to work with clients over the longer term and is concentrating on taking new drug targets right through to commercial stage, with the ability to switch easily between initial nebulised products (i.e., a low cost entry to early clinical trials) and dry powder inhalers for use in later clinical trials. This flexible on-site approach also means that the company can reduce time to market with 24/7 capabilities, which has allowed the company to deliver on every client clinical date.

Ian Lafferty, Site Director for Aesica Nottingham, commented: “Inhalation is a rapidly growing market with many US companies looking to bring NCE production to Europe, whilst we also see a dramatic growth for products going into China and SE Asia, particularly amongst generic formulations. We have largely operated under the radar in terms of inhalation products despite the wealth of new technologies coming to market here and our intention is to take a lead in bringing products to market faster and developing the next generation of technologies through our lead technical centre.”