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| PuraCap's new Puerto Rico site |
Generics maker PuraCap is beefing up its manufacturing, buying out a Kentucky company that has a solid-dose manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico as it looks to expand its reach internationally.
South Plainfield, NJ-based PuraCap, which has a soft-gel capsule plant in Wuhan, China, has struck a deal to buy Blu Pharmaceuticals, a small, minority-owned, generic pharmaceutical company based in Franklin, KY. As part of the deal, PuraCap gets Blu Caribe, which owns a 145,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Dorado, Puerto Rico, as well as Blu's 185,000-square-foot warehouse and distribution center in Franklin.
"This acquisition is a major step in the growth of our capability in the manufacturing of oral solid dosage forms in the United States, which complements our state-of-the-art soft gelatin capsule manufacturing facility in Wuhan, China," PuraCap Pharmaceutical CEO Dahai Guo said in a statement.
PuraCap said the Blu deal also gives it an entree into U.S. government purchasing. Part of the minority-owned company's business is to supply generic drugs to the Department of Veterans Affairs, Bureau of Prisons, Indian Health Services and the Department of Defense.
The plant in Puerto Rico that PuraCap gets was acquired by Blu in 2010 from Biovail, the company from which Valeant Pharmaceuticals International ($VRX) was born when Biovail and Valeant did a $3.2 billion cash-and-stock reverse merger that year. At the time that it bought the Biovail plant, Blu said it would invest about $60 million into the facility over three years.
In addition to the deal for Blu, PuraCap has said it has struck joint venture partnership with China-based Dangdai International Group, in an effort to expand internationally. Terms of the two deals were not disclosed.
- here's the release