Catalent Pharma Solutions has said it will invest $4.6 million in a further expansion of its Singapore clinical supply facility to support global and regional customers’ growth in clinical trials activity in the Asia-Pacific region.

Concretely, the plans involve building new flexible GMP space for secondary packaging, a doubling of ambient storage space and a quadrupling of cold storage capacity.

The New Jersey, USA-based company said its Singapore site, established in 1998, now provides full clinical supply services including project and supply chain management, comparator sourcing, clinical label printing, secondary packaging, clinical storage, import/export management, Importer of Record (IoR) service and full returns and destruction management services.

Customer demand at the site, which operates as a key regional hub for studies in Australia, Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong and other countries in Southeast Asia, has increased by 30% over the past year, Catalent said.

The company recently announced plans to open an additional cGMP facility at Kakegawa, Japan, where it has been providing oral drug development and manufacturing solutions for more than 40 years. In future, the site will be able to offer clinical supply solutions for global clinical trial sponsors based in Japan and elsewhere.

Catalent has clinical supply facilities in the US, UK, Germany and Japan in addition to Singapore, as well as an extended network of more than 50 audited depots.