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Cambridge Pharma promises to boost drug development

A new facility opens in Cambridge Research Park offering pharmaceutical development services.

Pharma and medical device manufacturer, SMC, has announced the opening of Cambridge Pharma – a new business offering pharmaceutical development services.

The new 20,000sq ft facility – located at the Cambridge Research Park – includes a purpose-built sterile fill-finish facility, a process development laboratory and an analytical laboratory.

Among the pioneering services is a sterile fill-finish facility which is designed to meet up-to-date regulatory requirements. Pivotally, it includes state-of-the-art heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems and two clean rooms. Furthermore, each clean room is equipped with isolators and fill-finish equipment to support batch sizes from 100 units to 15,000 units in vials, cartridges or syringes.

Cambridge Pharma’s industrialisation engineers can take a customer’s laboratory-scale formulation and develop a process for clinical trials in phases 1 to 3 including process development and filling of viscous formulations, suspensions and gels. Meanwhile, non-standard primary drug containers can be accommodated, while container closure integrity tests and associated equipment can also be developed.

Chetan Patel, owner and CEO of SMC Group, has a strategic vision for the company: “We value pharmaceutical partnerships and continue to expand services in development, manufacturing and analytical testing to help accelerate drug product development. We are proud to launch ‘Cambridge Pharma’ as a part of our continued focus, growth and commitment to pharmaceutical products and services.”

Barbara Lead, Cambridge Pharma CEO, added: “I am really proud of our new facilities and the experience and expertise of our teams. We can provide a range of pharmaceutical development services and we have experience with difficult to fill formulations. We aim to provide an excellent service to customers for clinical trial supplies which are always on the critical path to market.”

Tim Holden, Cambridge Pharma’s commercial director, concluded: “Our principal aim is to meet the challenging schedules Pharma clients face when planning clinical trial supplies. Specialising in this service ensures that development timelines can be minimised and cost savings can be made by our customers. We are very proud that our new facility has eco-friendly features which mean we can help pharma and biotech companies meet their sustainability targets too.”