CordenPharma will invest 900 million euros ($981 million) over the next three years to bolster its ability to manufacture GLP-1 peptides in Europe and the United States, the Swiss CDMO said on Tuesday.
It is the largest outlay ever for the 18-year-old company and is designed to meet the growing global demand for GLP-1 products for people with diabetes and obesity. The investment is part of the company’s plan to reach a sales target of 1 billion euros ($1.08 billion) by 2028, CordenPharma said. Last year, the company generated sales of 880 million euros ($952 million).
In an unidentified site in the “heart of Europe,” CordenPharma said it will build a new facility from the ground up, which will conduct clinical and commercial manufacturing of GLP-1 products and peptides.
In Boulder, Colorado, CordenPharma will expand its presence, building a new large-scale facility and increasing the capacity of its two other plants, which support clinical and commercial clients.
Corden's first facility in Boulder, acquired from Roche in 2011, develops and manufactures peptide APIs. It's second plant, which was gained in a 2017 purchase from Pfizer when the pharma giant was carving up its newly acquired Hospira manufacturing unit, produces highly potent APIs.
The investments will help CordenPharma fulfill multi-year contracts totaling 3 billion euros ($3.26 billion), which have additional upside, the company said.
“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,” CordenPharma CEO Michael Quirmbach said in a release.
In January of last year, CordenPharma revealed a $1 billion deal with a confidential customer to support a product launch from its facilities in Boulder. With that announcement, the company added that it was investing 200 million euros ($210 million) in expanding its global operations.
In December 2021, CordenPharma announced that it had acquired three manufacturing facilities in Europe from Vifor Pharma for an undisclosed sum. The deal was part of CSL’s $11.7 buyout of Vifor. The sites—two in Switzerland and one in Lisbon, Portugal—are part of Corden’s network of 11 facilities in six countries which employ more than 3,000.
In May of 2022, private equity firm Astorg acquired Corden from the International Chemical Investors Group (ICIG), a Luxembourg-based holding company. Bloomberg reported that the deal was for $2.6 billion.
EDITOR'S NOTE: A previous version of this story said that CordenPharma was based in Germany. Its headquarters are now in Switzerland.