The expectations on excipients have grown over the last years. No longer seen as mere fillers and binders, pharma is now looking toward excipients that add value to their end product and are multifunctional.

The most exciting trend in excipients is ...

Hans Ole Klingenberg (global marketing director at Novozymes): ... the pharmaceutical industry's shift towards recognizing excipients as functional ingredients rather than non-functional additives. As a result, manufacturers are increasingly looking for novel, value-added multifunctional excipients, that offer real advantages to both the manufacturer and patients. In addition, advances in technology offer new opportunities to explore simpler product formulations with reduced numbers of excipients.

For the excipient business, Asia is ...

Hans Ole Klingenberg (Novozymes): ... one of the fastest growing countries in terms of innovation. For example, in China, recent years have seen double-digit growth in the country's biotechnology industry, transforming it into one of the fastest growing in terms of biotech innovation. Novozymes was one of the first western biotech companies to enter China and has more than 20 years' experience running and operating facilities in the country. With this experience in hand, Novozymes is now looking to push the boundaries further with the opening of a new dedicated Q7 cGMP facility for the production of state of the art cGMP grade hyaluronic acid (HA) making it suitable for biomedical and pharmaceutical applications.

cGMP certification for excipients manufacturers is ...

Hans Ole Klingenberg (Novozymes): ... vital to ensure that drug development processes are as efficient and effective as possible. Working with raw materials that are already Q7 compliant can help medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers to reduce testing time, minimize documentation requirements, save on manufacturing costs and take products to market faster.

Our most crucial differentiating competence is ...

Hans Ole Klingenberg (Novozymes): ... Novozymes' commitment to providing solutions that help its customers solve their most demanding challenges. The company does this by providing access to high-quality ingredients, proprietary technologies and unique know-how, contributing toward the development of improved drug products that provide real and sustainable benefits to patients. As a company, we are constantly reviewing industry trends and looking for new opportunities to improve our customers' processes by developing better and safer alternatives to the products that they are currently marketing. However, we are more than a mere supplier of enabling technologies or products; we see our relationship with each customer as a partnership. By combining our scientists' unique knowledge of Novozymes' biological solutions with the customers' specific application knowledge, we work with our customers to find the right answer to their development challenges.

In excipients, innovation is driven by ...

Hans Ole Klingenberg (Novozymes): ... the demand for safe and consistent biologically-derived solutions that can ultimately improve treatments for patients. Novozymes develops and manufactures high-quality, animal-free, recombinant ingredients and technologies. We provide pharmaceutical manufacturers with proven options based on our established technology platform that has been developed over the last 50 years, and which will enable them to develop safer and more consistent products. Currently, 14% of Novozymes' total revenue is spent on R&D projects.