The new group, set up by Swedish CDMO Recipharm after it completed its acquisition of Cobra Biomanufacturing last week, will operate under the leadership of former Cobra CEO Simon Saxby from its facilities in Oxford and Keele, UK.
Recipharm CEO Thomas Eldered said that RCB integrates Cobra’s expertise in high-tech biologics development with the Swedish firm’s wider drug contracting offering, including its manufacturing facility in Södertälje.
He also that: “[the new group] has, we believe, created a much stronger force in the industry’s biologics outsourcing sector. Indeed, in addition to antibodies and rProteins, our integrated company competitively offers both process development and CGMP manufacturing services for viruses, DNA and cells.”
Eldered added: “The move will also serve to further build our position as a leading Contract Development and Manufacturing Organisation that provides a full range of high quality services.”
Recipharm’s expansion into biologics capacity fits with a general trend among Western contractors to focus on sectors with higher barriers to entry than traditional drug production, which can be done more cheaply elsewhere.
Speaking to Outsourcing-Pharma when the Cobra deal was announced last year, a Recipharm spokesman explained that the biologics’ market’s potential was a key motivation for the move.
“We believe this pharmaceutical sector will be more important in the future, both for being part of delivering better healthcare for patients and also because it will continue to grow.”