In its biggest investment so far, CordenPharma is earmarking €900 million ($982 million) over the next three years to expand its peptide platform capacity in the US and Europe to meet rising GLP-1 manufacturing demand.
The Swiss CDMO has “played a pretty significant role” in GLP-1 manufacturing so far and is now further expanding capacity, CEO Michael Quirmbach told Endpoints News in an interview.
CordenPharma will build a third facility at its only North American site in Boulder, CO, as well as add peptide manufacturing lines at one of two of its existing facilities on the same site. Its existing facilities in Colorado currently manufacture peptides, oligonucleotides, lipids and APIs for clinical and commercial use.
The CDMO will also build a new site from scratch in “the heart of Europe” for large-scale clinical and commercial peptide manufacturing for GLP-1 drugs. CordenPharma will reveal the location of the European site in the next three months, Quirmbach said.
All construction will be finished by 2027 and will go online in 2028, Quirmbach said. Around 400 new jobs will be added across the US and European expansions, he added. Both the US and European expansions will have capacity to make long and short peptides.
The expansion is a result of increasing demand for GLP-1 drugs, where CordenPharma has secured several undisclosed multiyear contracts worth around €3 billion to make peptides for GLP-1s. The company presently has a total of 10 manufacturing sites in Europe, plus the site in Colorado.
According to the CDMO, the added capacity announced Tuesday will help it reach its goal of making €1 billion in sales for its peptide offerings by 2028, including sales from APIs as well as oral and injectable peptides. CordenPharma made €880 million ($960 million) in sales for the 2023 fiscal year. It has over 3,000 employees.
Michael Quirmbach“We are honored by the trust our customers have placed in us to deliver expert outsourcing for large multiyear contracts, and our team is proud to contribute decades of peptide manufacturing experience towards these transformative new medicines,” CEO Michael Quirmbach said in a statement.
CordenPharma has made earlier moves in expanding its footprint. In April, it expanded its site in Frankfurt, Germany for early clinical-stage peptide APIs. In September 2023, it upgraded both of its Colorado facilities.
“CordenPharma has a unique opportunity to reinforce its leadership position in peptides with unmatched capacity and performance in large-scale manufacturing,” said Judith Charpentier, head of healthcare at Astorg, a private equity firm that took part in buying CordenPharma in May 2022.
Editor’s note: This article was updated to add comments from an interview with CEO Michael Quirmbach