NextPharma, the leading European provider of product development, contract manufacturing and cold chain and logistics outsourcing services to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, has announced that it has entered into partnership for technological innovation with Bone Therapeutics, a bone cell therapy company based in Belgium, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and Université de Liège (Ulg).

The partnership is being overseen by BioWin, the Health Cluster of Wallonia, in Belgium. The collaboration involves the development of Bone Therapeutics products to advance therapeutic approaches for the treatment of inflammatory mono-arthritis combining “novel” anti inflammatory compounds and viscoelastic scaffolds.

The first product to be developed will be a sterile depot (sustained release) formulation in pre-filled syringes for intra-articular administration. Product development and manufacture of this sterile investigational medicinal product in prefilled syringes will be undertaken in NextPharma’s new state-of-the-art Sterile Product Development Center in Belgium and laboratory work has already begun.

Successful clinical trials will result in the product’s commercial manufacture at NextPharma’s commercial scale sterile manufacturing facility on the same site. The site has recently been successfully FDA and PDMA (US and Japanese regulatory authorities) inspected and has extensive know-how in the production of lyophilized and non-lyophilized sterile pharmaceutical products, gained through over twenty years of experience in formulation development, manufacturing and packaging of sterile cytotoxic and non-cytotoxic products.

Sean Marett, managing director, NextPharma Technologies, Product Development Services (PDS) commented: “We are very pleased to be a part of this important project and to work alongside Bone Therapeutics, ULB and ULg. This work provides NextPharma with a great opportunity to demonstrate our investigational medicinal product development and manufacturing skills in pre-filled syringes as well as our ability to seamlessly scale-up from clinical trials to commercial scale quantities of the product at our Braine-l’Alleud site in Belgium in due course”.

NextPharma develops, manufactures, packages, and distributes a broad range of products and formulations for its customers including solids, liquids and semi-solid dosage forms, antibiotics, hormones and controlled release medicines. It has an established leadership position in the high technology area of injectables manufacturing (lyophilized and liquid fill), with particular expertise in product development and manufacture of oncology medicines.

NextPharma has recently been acquired by Sun European Partners with a view to leveraging NextPharma’s strong track record, reputation and state of the art facilities, to grow the business both organically and by acquisition.