Singapore sling: Catalent will invest $2.2M in clinical supply facility

Catalent is at it again in Singapore, expanding its clinical supply facility.

In this round, a $2.2 million investment will provide an additional 31,000 square feet, representing a 20% increase in floor space. It will allow for the addition of 35 ultra-low temperature freezers.

Along with the increased capacity, the site will grow its specialized secondary packaging capability for ULT products, allowing it to support more extensive packaging campaigns, Catalent said. The site also will be able to handle more biopharmaceuticals and advanced products such as mRNA vaccines, as well as cell and gene therapies.

“Our Singapore site serves as a strategic supply hub for the Asia-Pacific market, offering a wide range of services to customers in over 20 countries in the region,” Roel de Nobel, Catalent’s general manager, APAC, clinical development & supply, said in a release.

Four years ago, Catalent finished a $4.6 million project at the 24-year-old Singapore plant that provided more space for secondary packaging, a doubling of its ambient storage and a quadrupling of its cold storage capacity.

The factory performs clinical supply management, comparator sourcing, packaging, storage, global distribution and clinical returns and destruction.

In 2019, Catalent opened a 30,000-square-foot clinical supply site in Shanghai, citing a growing number of drug developers in the region. The company also serves the region with a clinical supply plant in Japan.

For more than a year and through a leadership change, Catalent has been focused on growth. Last month new CEO Alessandro Maselli made his first key acquisition, a $475 million buyout of another CDMO, Metrics Contract Services. The company, a subsidiary of Australia-based Mayne Pharma Group, has a 333,000-square-foot plant in Greenville, N.C., with the capacity to produce more than 1 billion solid-dose pills annually.

Over the last 13 months, Catalent has spent more than $1 billion on a variety of acquisitions.