The Wasdell Group, a U.K.-based provider of services to pharma clients, will invest a half-million pounds in a laboratory project that will support its pharma manufacturing work, including its move into sterile manufacturing this year.
The £500,000 ($671,000), 1,200-square-foot facility at its Newcastle site, will allow the company to provide in-house microbiological and analytical services to its customers and will support its manufacturing, packaging and quality control (QC) teams, it said in an announcement Thursday.
“We’ve seen a notable increase in demand for analytical support from our existing clients and the investment in our microbiological capabilities has been driven by our planned move into the manufacture of sterile products later this year,” Daniel Tedham, managing director at Wasdell, said in a statement.
The Newcastle expansion follows its decision last fall to build a new €30 million pharmaceutical facility in Dundalk, Ireland, which will offer QC import testing, a variety of current and novel packaging technologies, as well as storage and distribution.
That 70,000-square-foot facility will employ 300 when it is complete in fourth-quarter 2018 and will incorporate serialization technology to meet new regulations. It is Wasdell’s first facility outside of the U.K. and was initiated to ensure its release testing of products for the European market in the event of a hard Brexit.