Popular CDMO Asymchem Labs is planning to manufacture a new facility on the outskirts of China in a deal that will cost between 4 billion ($557 million) and 5 billion Chinese yuan ($697 million).
The Jiangsu Taixing Economic Development Zone would serve as the location for the facility. In addition to producing chemical raw materials and other essential molecule drug substances, the site would have research and development as its main objectives.
Since the project is still in the preliminary stages of negotiations, the company hasn’t provided any additional details.
Like others in the CDMO circle, Asymchem has been on an expansion spree since the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise in demand for commercial drug production. The company built brand-new production facilities in April this year at its Dunhua and Tianjin manufacturing facilities in China. It claimed at the time that the plan was to double its overall small-molecule batch capacity of 850 cubic meters by the end of the year.
Similarly, in February, the firm spent a mammoth $58 million to buy Snapdragon Chemistry – an American company specializing in continuous manufacturing and chemical process development. However, the failure to meet US Treasury regulations led to the companies’ early termination of the agreement.
Meanwhile, Chinese CDMO Jiuzhou Pharmaceutical has announced its plans to acquire a Sandoz finished drugs facility in southern China for upwards of $15 million. In accordance with the contract, Sandoz China will separate the plant and its manufacturing assets into a new business, which will become a subsidiary of Jiuzhou upon the completion of the deal.
The Chinese company also plans to refurbish and expand the facility with the $18.5 million it will put into the Sandoz project. As per Jiuzhou, this move will strengthen the firm’s position as a crucial link in Novartis’ global supply chain, as it’s already a contract manufacturer for the Swiss healthcare giant. The agreement states that Jiuzhou must keep supplying Sandoz with goods from the Zhongshan facility for at least 20 months after the deal closes.
Before signing this deal, Jiuzhou had plans to build its own manufacturing factory to produce oral solids. The goal was to reach an annual capacity of 450 million tablets, but the company soon realized that plan was too ambitious and would have taken a very long time to actually come to fruition, so it scrapped it.
As of June 2022, the company already has 700 CDMO contracts on the table; 662 of those contracts constitute phase 1 and 2 clinical trials, which it believes is an excellent sign for the long-term dosage manufacturing business.
As for Sandoz, it’s currently spinning off from Novartis to allow the latter to focus solely on innovative medicines. The plan was revealed a month ago, with the separation expected to officially go through sometime in mid-2023.
On the other hand,, Novartis has shut down its Sandoz oral dosage facility in North Carolina, which produced capsules and tablets for the United States and Canada. Novartis has recently been working to increase Sandoz’s capabilities in the area of complex genetics in order to lessen the company’s reliance on simple-to-make oral solids.
