Novo Holdings acquired South Carolina-based sterile injectables manufacturer Ritedose for an undisclosed price.
Ritedose, which specializes in blow-fill-seal technology and has been focusing on the outsourced sterile compounding market for drugs in short supply, employs about 400 people at its Columbia, South Carolina, campus.
The sale is expected to close in the first quarter of this year, and Ritedose chief executive Jody Chastain will remain to run the manufacturer under Novo Holding's ownership. Additional financial terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed.
Ritedose began pumping $110 million into upgrades at its Columbia site in 2014 as part of an expansion that added about 80,000 square feet to the previous 120,000-square-foot facility, growing its capacity from about 1 billion units a year to about 2 billion units.
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“The investment in Ritedose is perfectly aligned with our deep expertise in pharma services,” Abhijeet Lele, the head of principal investments in the U.S. for Novo Holdings, said in a statement. “We are also particularly excited to be at the vanguard of increasing vaccine availability through the use of blow-fill-seal injectable technology.”