Following demand, Milford pharma expanded
Courtesy
Scott Brown
Courtesy
A rendering of the expanded manufacturing facility at Avecia in Milford.
Last month, Milford pharmaceutical maker Nitto Denko Avecia Inc. announced it would expand its facility to turn it into the world’s largest manufacturing site for a drug ingredient called oligonucleotide. The ingredient is becoming more and more popular in drug making as science advances.
In an interview, Scott Brown, the company’s vice president of business development, spoke about the science behind what they do, the expansion, and working with clients around the world.
What do you make?
If you think about a drug that contains DNA or RNA, we actually make what they call active pharmaceutical ingredients, or API, that a client would use to put into their drug. The drugs we would manufacture or the API we would manufacture for our clients are for really specialized drugs. They’re very specific, for rare, hereditary type diseases.
If you think about DNA, there's a certain number of chains in DNA. Depending on the drug somebody is going to use it for, it would have a specific target.
In order to get that drug to the liver or to fight cancer, for example, if its DNA- or RNA-based medicine it has a certain number of chains on it. If you picture it like a beaded necklace, we put the beads on the necklace to a certain length to be able to get to where the disease is.
That can depend on what the drug is, what it treats, and where it needs to go. Our clients dictate what we need to manufacture for them. If they say, "We need the necklace to be 50 chains long," we would make 50-chain necklace, and then they would use that to make the final drug.
Who are your clients?
We do contract manufacturing for different drug companies all over the world. Most of them are in North America and Europe, but we do serve clients throughout the entire world, from large pharmaceutical companies down to very small biotech companies with a couple of people, an idea, a molecule.
You recently announced an expansion of your facility that would make you the world’s largest manufacturing site for oligonucleotide. Why are you expanding?
There’s a demand in the market for more of these type of products, but there’s not enough capacity or contract manufacturing organizations to actually produce it.
Companies are actually looking at this technology to be able to manufacture drugs to fight certain kinds of diseases.
Oligonucleotides are proving to be effective at treating diseases; that’s why more people are getting into them. Probably 10 or 15 years ago, they were the technology everyone was looking at, but there were not a lot of commercially approved products out there. If you fast forward to now, they’re starting to be more successful in clinics, and more people are getting into it. The science is better.
We put in new manufacturing capabilities to make oligonucleotides. We actually have been hiring for the last couple of years. We have added 120 jobs in the last 12 months, and we currently have about 50 open positions. In addition to Milford, we also have facilities in Cincinnati and California. Part of the expansion is also office space, to be able to hold all of the people.
This interview was conducted and edited for length and clarity by Laura Finaldi, former WBJ staff writer.
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