With key expansions coming to fruition on either side of the pond, specialist CDMO Hovione is making sure that drugmakers can access its particle engineering expertise across multiple geographies.
That flexibility will be key for the Portugal-based company in the coming years as the pharmaceutical industry continues to embrace more regional supply chains. In a recent interview, Hovione's David Basile, VP of technical operations for the Americas, discussed this trend and the manufacturer's expansion project, which is set to come online in New Jersey next month.
In the coming weeks, Hovione plans to debut a new spray drying expansion at its campus in East Windsor, New Jersey. The company has invested $100 million to expand its campus, including new construction and the acquisition of an additional facility and greenfield land.
Specifically, one of two pharmaceutical spray drying-3 units, or PSD-3 units, will come online in the coming weeks to tackle amorphous active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and amorphous solid dispersions, according to the company.
With some 80% of new small molecules in development insoluble in water, Hovione’s particle engineering and amorphous solid dispersion platform helps medicine developers improve the solubility, bioavailability, and, in some cases, the stability of their drug candidates, Basile said.
The company boasts spray dryers from the lab scale to PSD3 at its original facility in East Windsor, in addition to the pair of large-scale machines about to be activated at the campus' new facility.
“We’re going for a single, unified site with capabilities across the campus to do drug substance through finished drug product under one governance and quality system,” Basile told Fierce.
Longer term, Hovione has 15 acres of additional real estate at the site that it plans to use for future spray drying capacity increases, Basile noted. Over the next 5 to 10 years, Hovione expects to continue to develop the New Jersey campus across more than 200,000 square feet.
Meanwhile, separate from the ASD moves, Hovione also plans to operationalize a next-generation continuous tableting line—in partnership with supplier GEA and its continuous direct compression (CDC) tech—at the campus in the near- to mid-term, Basile said. He described the tech as “great for potent products” and noted that it has the ability to perform both batch and continuous manufacturing runs.
While Basile couldn’t share specific figures, he noted that the company “staffed up fairly significantly in New Jersey in preparation for the expansion,” noting that Hovione’s overall workforce has recently grown to more than 2,500 people globally.
The $100 million poured into this cycle of Hovione’s New Jersey investment forms part of a broader expansion exceeding $400 million across multiple global sites, he added.
Now, with those site upgrades coming online in the Garden State and other locales like Ireland, where Hovione has beefed up capacity in recent years, 2026 is “more of a year to operationalize some of the ongoing expansion activities,” Basile said.
Hovione has historically worked mostly with small- and medium-scale biotechs, but more recently it has added “19 of the top 20 large pharma companies” to its roster of clients, according to Basile.
“We’re seeing a lot more partnerships with them,” said the executive. “We like to partner and be an extension of our client’s workforce, if you will. And really, their project becomes our mission.”
With that growing roster of clients, Basile said that recent threats of U.S. tariffs and other policy-tinged trade volatility “don’t really directly affect us,” although he caveated that Hovione has experienced “minor cost implications on some supplies” and raw materials amid global market fluctuations.
“I think the trend toward regional supply chains is really impacting the industry,” Basile said of the broader reshoring zeal that has gripped governments and drugmakers throughout the decade.
“We’re seeing a flurry of tech transfers into the U.S.,” he continued. “Our clients are looking more and more to bring dual supply and sourcing across both sides of the Atlantic.”