Familiar Face - Michel Spagnol is no stranger to the chemical industry; Novasep's brand-new CEO has held senior-level positions in companies such as Rhodia and Shasun. He brings plenty to the table in his new role at a company with many different areas of expertise: custom manufacturing, process development and purification equipment provider. Brandi Schuster asked him about his expectation for his first year.

CHEManager Europe: What are your goals for your first year on the job?
Michel Spagnol: As you know, the first year as a CEO is a unique moment: One brings an external view and confronts it with internal reality. This is the perfect time to bring new impulses and changes to the organization and teams. I am delighted to lead a company with a unique position on the market.

Indeed, Novasep is a service company with a dominant and invaluable set of specialized technologies with hazardous chemistries, highly potent API handling capabilities and of course expert purification solutions, which we use for producing custom made products and sell to various markets. The company has also a strong track record in innovation which has been the pillar of its success. But beyond technologies, our Novasep teams have great know-how and expertise and can operate at highest standards of safety and quality.

In my first month at Novasep, I discovered my colleagues' enthusiasm and dedication to the company and our customers' projects, which lead me to believe Novasep employees' mindset is a key competitive differentiator and a powerful driving force for development.

Generally speaking, Novasep is doing well in 2013 with business level on track with expectations and solid pipeline of projects for the future.  We have to prepare for 2014 and the future by drawing the strategy of Novasep, which is too early to disclose at this point.

But I firmly believe that technology differentiation will remain a strong development factor for Novasep. My plan is to create the right management and business conditions to accelerate it.

How will you bring your experience as president and CTO of Shasun to the table as CEO of Novasep?
Michel Spagnol: With top management positions at Shasun and formerly at Rhodia, I experienced different company cultures: On one hand, an agile worldwide Indian company with a strong track record, on the other a technology-driven, large European company with a global presence and established management style.

Having worked with an Indian company, but also in France and in the U.S., has given me strong global knowledge of life science markets and of our customers' and competitors' cultures, which will help me to accurately seize the best opportunities for Novasep and increase further its competitiveness.

The recently announced hiring of Christian Thiry, our new CFO, follows the same idea: Christian brings his rich and in depth experience from his previous positions at Stallergene and various other companies.

Novasep manufactures primarily in Europe and North America and works within three fields of expertise: development of manufacturing solutions; custom manufacturing; and the sale of purification processes. What are the advantages of this business model?
Michel Spagnol: Novasep has adopted a unique business model indeed, by offering custom manufacturing services for fine chemicals and biomolecules, and purification equipment solutions, in particular with industrial chromatography and filtration.

We have operations in Europe, China, and North America. Our flourishing activities in China in Industrial Biotechnologies triggered the recent facility's expansion. Our differentiated business model provides us with many opportunities to build up a unique offering to better serve our customers: We benefit from the breadth of our offering. As examples: combining synthesis and chiral separation to drastically reduce the manufacturing cost of our customers' chiral chemicals, leveraging our custom purification expertise to improve the design of our equipment and expand the scope of our services to our customers, etc.

We also leverage know-how acquired in various markets to improve our competitiveness. For instance, we have implemented purification technologies usually used for food ingredients purification in our chemical sites to manufacture certain complex molecules. Also, our BioSC, continuous biochromatography for biopharmaceuticals purification, such as monoclonal antibodies or blood factors, is covered by the same patents as our continuous ion exchange technology for multi-ton, organic acid purification in food and bio-based chemical industries.

Our offering is based on our expert process development services that integrate the process as a whole: synthesis and  purification, biopharma upstream and downstream processes with a fully optimized process in terms of efficiency, cost-effectiveness, productivity and product quality. On top of that, we are a full service provider, with a solid experience in regulatory affairs.

Novasep is currently in the thick of building the world's largest chromatography plant for the production of large volume commercial APIs at the Mourenx site. How is the building progressing?
Michel Spagnol: The building of our new production plant in Mourenx, France has progressed very well. As for the chromatography equipment, our teams in Pompey, France have engineered and are building this exceptional equipment in record time. The project is on track.

Once on stream, what benefits will the plant bring for the company?
Michel Spagnol: With the new plant, Novasep will gain the position of a major producer of high purity grade omega-3. As recently announced, Novasep has been selected by Amarin as its latest provider of Vascepa API, highly purified EPA, and we are seeking FDA approval. Vascepa is a novel treatment for hypertriglyceridemia, already approved for lowering very high triglycerides and pending regulatory approval for treating people having high triglycerides, a roughly tenfold larger patient population.

Beyond the manufacturing opportunity for our CMO business, this project is also a demonstration of the cost-effectiveness of Novasep's chromatography technologies for producing large volume APIs.This success is a demonstration of how Novasep's business model brings together our expertise in custom manufacturing, process development and as purification equipment provider.

Visit Novasep at the CPhI 2013 in Frankfurt Oct. 22-24 in hall 5, booth C30.