Swiss fine chemicals producer and drug developer Lonza has completed a $15 million multi-phase expansion at its site in Tampa, Florida, USA, adding solid oral dose development and manufacturing capabilities.

The project, said Lonza, will enable the site to provide more integrated services across early stage product development, manufacture of material for clinical trials and drug commercialization.

The site now hosts a fully equipped product development and quality control laboratory area with 13 processing suites along with two packaging suites that include low-humidity environments and serialization for tracking and tracing.

Lonza has also added manufacturing suites for tablet, multi-particulate and powder-encapsulated drug products as well as dedicated sampling and dispensing areas capable of handling highly potent compounds.

The development suites include expanded powder-in-capsule/powder-in-bottle micro-dosing capacity for early phase studies.

In addition, the Swiss group has expanded and renovated its cGMP manufacturing clean room.

 “This expansion at our Tampa site adds concept-to-commercial capacity for the US market, said Anthony Macci, senior vice president global operations, chemical division of Lonza Pharma & Biotech. “We continue to invest heavily in our site network to ensure that flexible, phase-appropriate and integrated capabilities are in place to meet the needs of today’s pharma and biotech innovator companies.”

Earlier this month, Lonza announced that it had signed an agreement to buy a sterile drug product fill & finish plant from Novartis.