Cambrex Corporation, a pharmaceutical development company, announced the expansion of its Longmont facility earlier this month. The added laboratory space will lend itself to enabling more analytical testing capabilities and growth for the company.
The Longmont facility gained approximately 1,800 square feet in laboratory space by repurposing a decommissioned space, according to Bruce Johnson, vice president and site director of the Longmont Cambrex site. The campus once housed Array BioPharma before it was sold to Avista Pharma Solutions in 2015. Cambrex later acquired Avista in 2019, taking over the facility. Johnson said that the space was decommissioned somewhere around 2012 and 2013. The project took about nine months to a year to complete according to Michael Andretich, director of facilities and environmental health and safety for Cambrex in Longmont.
Since Cambrex acquired Avista, the small molecule company has grown its analytical services organization 80%, Johnson said. Cambrex is a contract development manufacturing organization, or CDMO, meaning it partners with other pharmaceutical companies to research, develop and manufacture therapeutics. The Longmont expansion will support those efforts.
“In order for us to continue to grow the business on the site, we need to continue to expand our analytical services capabilities,” Johnson said.
The recommissioning of the laboratory space was a $600,000 investment for Cambrex and included fixing the air handling units, fume hoods and various infrastructure. But the addition of analytical instruments for the project cost more than $1 million, according to Johnson. Two of these key instruments added are multiple high-performance liquid chromatography, or HPLC),used to analyze a material’s purity and its content, and dissolution equipment, which examines drug release.
Cambrex has 12 sites across North America and Europe, but Longmont’s site is a key and unique campus, Johnson said. Acquiring Longmont allowed Cambrex to work in the early-development stage and offer end-to-end services.
“This particular site is unique from the other ones, in that we are really focused on that sweet spot between discovery and into phase two of clinical trials,” Johnson said. “And so by growing our analytical services organization, it supports the expansion of all of our work we can do on the site.”
Johnson said he predicts that the site’s analytical services will grow 25% with the expansion. With that, Cambrex will need more talent and plans on adding about 20% in jobs of its current 115 staff members based out of Longmont.
