After earmarking a major chunk of change last year to bulk up in peptide production, European CDMO CordenPharma is putting its money where its mouth is.
CordenPharma will spend half of a planned €1 billion strategic peptide investment on a new facility outside of Basel, Switzerland, which is slated to kick off commercial work in the first half of 2028.
The €500 million ($536 million) project will create multiple manufacturing lines able to support small-, medium-, and large-scale peptide production, CordenPharma said in a March 5 press release. The plant will ultimately be able to tackle both GLP-1 and non-GLP-1 peptide projects, the company added.
Construction is tipped to begin this year in Muttenz, Switzerland—some 8 km outside of Basel—with facility qualifications scheduled to take place in 2027.
When completed in the first half of 2028, CordenPharma forecasts the site will create 300 new jobs.
“The new facility is designed to deliver flexible and efficient peptide manufacturing to meet the growing demand of innovative peptide medicines for our customers and ultimately, patients,” Michael Quirmbach, CordenPharma’s president and chief executive, said in a statement Wednesday.
The new facility in Switzerland will also dovetail with the company’s expansion of its Boulder site in Colorado, doubling CordenPharma's annual solid phase peptide synthesis (SPPS) reactor capacity to more than 42,000 liters by 2028.
It was last July that the CDMO—which was purchased for a reported $2.6 billion by the private equity firm Astorg in 2022—announced it would invest 900 million euros ($981 million) over three years to boost its ability to manufacture GLP-1 peptides in Europe and the U.S. to meet growing demand in diabetes and obesity.
Now, CordenPharma has lifted that investment goal to more than 1 billion euros.
Through its expansion efforts, the company has set out to reach a sales target of more than 1 billion euros ($1.08 billion) by 2028. CordenPharma generated sales of 880 million euros ($952 million) in 2023 and 854 million euros ($919 million) in its 2024 financial year.