CordenPharma plans €900m peptide push in US and Germany

The contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) is expanding its Colorado, US, facility and constructing a greenfield site in “the heart of” Europe, enabling Corden to meet the growing demand for peptides.

The firm has set a sales target of €1 billion ($1.09 billion) by 2028 for its peptide platform, which works across multiple facilities, including its Colorado and recently scaled-up Frankfurt, Germany sites, and now the additional site resulting from this record expansion.

The peptide platform provides fully integrated peptide development and manufacturing services. Spanning from clinical stages to commercial supply, the platform produces peptide for active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) to drug products (DP), both for sterile injectables and oral solid dosage peptide delivery.

“Corden is expanding its DP capabilities, both for injectables and oral-dosage peptide delivery capabilities. The new platform produces peptide APIs for those products. This investment will help us meet the growing demand for these innovative medicines on the API side for many customers active in this space,” a spokesperson for CordenPharma told BioProcess Insider.

“We will continue to work closely with our key customers to effectively, flexibly, and quickly address any growing demand. We are proud of our strong track record in bringing capacity on-line, thanks to our successful execution of large capital expenditure projects across 11 global manufacturing sites.”

As a part of its plan, the Swiss CDMO is expanding its facility in Boulder, Colorado to meet the increasing demands for glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1).

“We are already operating some of the largest peptide-manufacturing capacities in the world today. However, based on additional demand and multi-year contracts we have signed with customers, we will be constructing a new building with additional large-scale process trains, each consisting of several thousand liters of capacity, capable of producing multi-metric tons of peptide APIs,” the spokesperson said.

“The peptide process trains will be designed to handle a wide range of GLP-1 agonists and other peptides using cutting-edge technologies. Additionally, the design and automation concepts will be employed to ensure the expansion meets the most demanding customer and regulatory requirements for efficient peptide-manufacturing operations.”

The firm operates two current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) sites in Colorado that develop and manufacture peptides, oligonucleotides, lipids, and highly potent and small-molecule APIs from laboratory-scale to commercialization.

Along with this, the CDMO is constructing a greenfield site for small to large-scale peptide production in Europe, offering various sizes of peptide manufacturing trains and purification technologies, mainly focused on medium- to large-scale manufacturing capacity.

Though the location of the site has not been disclosed, a spokesperson for the firm told us. “The site will be fully integrated into Corden’s global facility network, working closely with [the] small-scale and clinical peptide facility at Frankfurt and [the] large-scale commercial peptide-production plant in Colorado.”