Two Noramco facilities will become a stand-alone CDMO business and will use their former name, Halo Pharma. The divestment came the same day Swiss CDMO Siegfried revealed it's buying three different Noramco active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) facilities from SK Capital.
The plants that will make up Halo Pharma are in Whippany, New Jersey, and Montreal. They were purchased by Noramco from Cambrex in 2023. New Jersey-based Cambrex acquired Halo Pharma and its two plants in 2016 for $425 million.
Halo’s sterile CDMO business will kick off operations in the second half of 2026, the new company said. The divestment allows for more focus on drug product services in North America as Halo expands into more complex drug product manufacturing services, Halo added.
“Anytime you can focus on doing one thing really well, success is inevitable,” Lee Karras, who moves from the CEO post of Noramco to become the CEO of Halo, said in a release. “I look forward to working with the Halo teams more directly at both sites. We already have significant interest from established pharma companies looking to sign up in advance for sterile CDMO services.”
Halo will offer capabilities across a variety of dosage forms, including solid, semi-solid, and oral liquid, and is expanding to include sterile vial, prefilled syringe, and cartridge formats. Halo will also perform sterile product development, including analytical testing and formulation services, the company said.
Siegfried adds three API sites from Noramco
As for Swiss CDMO Siegfried, the company has been on a growth jag over the last decade. The story continued Tuesday as Siegfried revealed agreements to acquire the controlled drug substance businesses of the Noramco Group and Extractas Bioscience.
With the deals, Siegfried picks up three active pharmaceutical ingredient facilities for small molecule production. Combined, these sites employ approximately 400 people. Financial terms of the transactions were not disclosed, though the price was “well below recent expectations for US assets,” the company said in an investor presentation (PDF).
From the Noramco Group, Siegfried gains a commercial-scale production site in Wilmington, Delaware. Siegfried also acquires Noramco subsidiary Purisys, which operates out of a clinical development and manufacturing facility in Athens, Georgia.
Additionally, Siegfried picks up Australia-based Extractas Bioscience—formerly Tasmanian Alkaloids.
Investors registered their approval of the transactions, bumping up Siegfried's share price by 13%.
Siegfried made the deals with SK Capital, which gained Noramco and Extractas a decade ago when it purchased the opiate supply business of Johnson & Johnson for $800 million.
“By adding exceptional US-based capabilities, we will become even more attractive to both existing and new customers, creating new opportunities to accelerate profitable growth,” CEO Marcel Imwinkelried said in a release. “The combined capacity and expertise of the three sites strengthen our position as a leading CDMO for small-molecule drug substances.”
Siegfried has made a number of acquisitions over the last decade, contributing to an increase in revenue from 315 million Swiss francs in 2014 to 1.3 billion Swiss francs ($1.4 billion) in 2024.
In 2024, Siegfried purchased a early-phase development and manufacturing facility in Grafton, Wisconsin, from fellow CDMO Curia.
In 2020, the company struck a deal with Novartis, gaining two facilities in Spain that produce finished injectable eye drugs, inhaled capsules and oral solid-dose medicines.
Five years before that, Siegfried paid $302 million for BASF’s ephedrine, pseudoephedrine and caffeine API businesses as well as BASF’s custom drug manufacturing operation. The four facilities are all located in Europe.