Eurofins pumping $5m into a UK biopharmaceutical testing site
The planned 5,800m2 facility at Brucefield Industry Park will house include a range of GMP pharmaceutical testing services, including method development and validation, finished product and raw material testing, elemental impurity testing, micro testing and stability studies.
The investment will include the addition of a new inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) machine and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) equipment to increase capacity by 40%.
Alison Clayton, general manager at Eurofins, told this publication the investment will add an initial 15-20 staff to the firm’s UK operations, but further jobs will be added from 2018 as the facility’s capabilities grow.
She added that while the site’s clients will primarily be made up of Big Pharma and multinationals initially looking to test their small molecules, the firm “will look to extend capabilities in line with the wider Eurofins strategy” to include larger molecule and biological testing.
“Testing for biologics can be more expensive than small molecules as there can be a greater number of more complex test requirements,” she said. “For example, regulatory bodies require orthogonal analytical techniques when available to better reveal the structure and stability of biopharmaceuticals.”
Furthermore, there are some different techniques used to test large molecules, though Clayton said Eurofins has “a wide capability for these techniques” within its network.
The investment is the latest by the contract research organisation (CRO) which announced last August it was adding 4,400m2 of lab space at its bioanalytical facility in Dungarvan, Ireland and committed to a further 1,800m2 at a second site nearby.
