With significant expansion works taking shape on both sides of the pond, specialist CDMO Hovione is ensuring pharmaceutical companies can access its particle engineering expertise across multiple geographies.
That flexibility will be key for the Portugal-based company in the coming years as the pharmaceutical industry continues to embrace more regional supply chains. David Basile, Hovione’s vice president of technology operations for the Americas, spoke in a recent interview about this trend and the manufacturer’s expansion project scheduled to go live in New Jersey next month.
Hovione plans to open a new spray drying expansion at its East Windsor, New Jersey, campus by the end of April. According to a company presentation at this year’s manufacturing-focused DCAT Week, the company invested $100 million to build two new facilities on campus, doubling its footprint and tripling its spray drying capacity at both development and commercial scales.
Specifically, two Particle Spray Drying-3 units (PSD-3 units) will be commissioned in the coming weeks to work on amorphous active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and amorphous solid dispersions.
Since approximately 80% of new small molecules in development are insoluble in water, Hovione’s particle engineering and amorphous solid dispersion platform can help drug developers improve the solubility, bioavailability and, in some cases, stability of drug candidates, Basil said.
The company boasts spray dryers ranging from lab-scale to PSD3 in its original facility in East Windsor, as well as two larger machines that will be operational in a new facility on campus.
“We are aiming for a single, integrated site with campus-wide capabilities that can manage drug substance to finished drug product under a single governance and quality system,” Basil told Fierce.
In the long term, Hovione has an additional 15 acres of real estate on site that it plans to use to increase its spray drying capacity in the future, Basile said. Hovione expects to continue developing its New Jersey campus of more than 200,000 square feet over the next five to 10 years.
Meanwhile, apart from the ASD move, Hovione also plans to partner with supplier GEA and its continuous direct compression (CDC) technology to have a next-generation continuous tableting line up and running on campus later this year, Basile said. He described the technology as “ideal for high-strength products” and said it has the ability to perform both batch and continuous manufacturing.
Although Basile couldn’t provide specific numbers, he said the company has “made some pretty significant headcount increases in New Jersey in preparation for expansion,” noting that Hovione’s overall workforce has recently increased to more than 2,500 people worldwide.
The $100 million poured into this cycle of Hovione’s New Jersey investment forms part of a broader expansion of more than $400 million across multiple global sites, he added.
These site upgrades are now coming online in the Garden State and other regions, such as Ireland, where Hovione has ramped up production capacity in recent years, and Basil said 2026 “will be the year we begin to ramp up some of our ongoing expansion efforts.”
Hovione has traditionally worked primarily with small and medium-sized biotech companies, but recently added “19 of the top 20 large pharmaceutical companies” to its client roster, Basile said.
“We’re partnering with them more and more,” the executive said. “We want to partner and become an extension of our clients’ workforce, and in fact their projects become our mission.”
Mr Basil said the recent threat of US tariffs and other policy-related trade changes “does not have a direct impact on us” as the company’s customer roster grows, but warned that Hovion is experiencing “some cost impact on some supplies and raw materials” amid fluctuations in global markets.
“I think the trend toward regional supply chains is having a big impact on the industry,” Basile said of the widespread reshoring enthusiasm that has attracted governments and pharmaceutical companies throughout the last decade.
“There is a lot of technology transfer to the United States,” he continued. “Our clients are increasingly demanding dual supply and sourcing on both sides of the Atlantic.”
