Novo Holdings acquired South Carolina-based sterile injectables manufacturer Ritedose for an undisclosed price.
Ritedose, which specializes in blow-fill-seal technology and has been focusing on the outsourced sterile compounding market for drugs in short supply, employs about 400 people at its Columbia, South Carolina, campus.
The sale is expected to close in the first quarter of this year, and Ritedose chief executive Jody Chastain will remain to run the manufacturer under Novo Holding’s ownership. Additional financial terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed.
Ritedose began pumping $110 million into upgrades at its Columbia site in 2014 as part of an expansion that added about 80,000 square feet to the previous 120,000-square-foot facility, growing its capacity from about 1 billion units a year to about 2 billion units.
Novo Holdings, which has been on an investment tear in recent years, announced two weeks ago it would pump $97.1 million into tiny 21st.BIO, a Danish bioproduction startup looking to scale up the manufacture of proteins and peptides. 21st.BIO uses Novozyme technology to develop the right expression platform for large-scale production molecules.
In July, Novo Holdings said it pledged $112 million to fund Biosustain, a research center at the Technical University of Denmark that pioneers renewable alternatives to drugs, consumer goods and other products typically produced from fossil fuels or rare plant materials.
“The investment in Ritedose is perfectly aligned with our deep expertise in pharma services,” Abhijeet Lele, the head of principal investments in the U.S. for Novo Holdings, said in a statement. “We are also particularly excited to be at the vanguard of increasing vaccine availability through the use of blow-fill-seal injectable technology.”
by Joseph Keenan
Source: fiercepharma.com
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