Cambridge Major to build plant
14.05.2008 04:00
Health
- Source: JS Online
Cambridge Major Laboratories will announce today a major expansion that gives it the ability to make active pharmaceutical ingredients on a large scale. The Germantown supplier of chemical ingredients to the pharmaceutical and biotech industries will break ground in June on a 120,000-square-foot manufacturing plant next to its headquarters, which is expected to be completed in August 2009, said President and Chief Executive Officer Michael Major. The factory will cost at least $30 million and house six manufacturing suites with reactors - the vessels that chemicals are combined in - that hold as much as 2,000 gallons, Major said. It will have capacity for adding at least three more suites that can contain reactors that can hold up to 4,000 gallons, he said. The new facility will give Cambridge Major a foothold in the commercial manufacturing arena, Major said. Not many companies do smaller research-and-development projects and larger manufacturing projects, he said. Cambridge Major wants to help its customers as they develop prototypes of their drugs, and stay with them until the market stabilizes and they start looking for commodity manufacturing, he said. "We want to basically live with our customer from the beginning," Major said. The company expects to complete more than 400 chemistry projects this year, and the small-volume plant it built in 2004 is approaching maximum capacity, said Brian W. Scanlan, vice president of corporate development. "We are literally busting at the seams with new business as the entire pharmaceutical industry has moved to an outsourced model," Scanlan said. "The new, larger manufacturing assets will enable us to ride this wave longer and retain the ability to manufacture at large scale the products we spend literally years developing." Cambridge Major is making a number of active ingredients for customers with drugs in Phase III trials and hopes to retain those customers for their commercial manufacturing needs, he said. Cambridge Major was founded in 1999 by Major and has increased its revenue by 30% a year since then, and by about 45% in 2007, Scanlan said. It has 160 employees, with about 100 of them in Germantown, including about 25 chemists. A Washington, D.C., private equity firm, Arlington Capital Partners, acquired a majority stake in 2007. Cambridge Major made its first acquisition in November of a Netherlands company called ChemShop B.V.
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