Clariant production of intermediates in India

Clariant Pharmaceutical's Roha/Thane facility near Mumbai in India has successfully produced commercial quantities of intermediates and advanced building blocks for pharmaceutical manufacture, including complex building blocks for statin manufacture.

'Clariant is the only major supplier to the pharmaceutical industry with an integrated India-based facility providing high-value intermediates and starting materials,' said Dr Ralf Pfirmann, global director, pharmaceutical market management for Clariant Pharmaceuticals. 'We are delivering the reliability, quality and confidentiality of a Western supplier with factor costs typical of the Indian market.'

Meanwhile, the company's Isso plant in Italy has successfully completed a US FDA audit and is now scheduled to begin manufacture APIs and other regulated materials for the US market by the end of 2003.

Two major developments of Clariant's US facilities have also been announced. At Springfield, Missouri, the company is expanding its Molecules Synthesis Centre, which provides support to drug discovery and development programmes with manufacturing capabilities from 5-200kg levels. The expansion will meet increased demand from North America for early phase materials. Clariant's organometallics capacity at Springfield is also being enlarged. The expansion features lithium technology and low temperature capability on a large scale for commercial production of organometallics, and includes an 8000 litre reaction train capably of producing as much as 300 tonnes of material a year under cGMP conditions.

Finally, Clariant Pharmaceuticals is undertaking a new initiative focusing on using microreactor technology (MRT) for specialised chemical synthesis requirements. These include applications that require rapid scale-up, those that have potential safety issues at traditional scales, and reactions that require an uncommonly high level of control or high purity.