Drugs company completes £6m expansion of Alnwick site

Quotient Sciences, a drug development and manufacturing accelerator, can now boast a state-of-the-art drug substance manufacturing capability at its Willowburn site.

The expansion of the former Arcinova site means it is now one of the most technically advanced of its kind in the UK.

It enables Quotient to support customers with an ‘end to end’ offering from candidate selection through to early clinical development and commercial product launch.

Mark Egerton, chief executive of Quotient Sciences, said: “Since acquiring the Alnwick facility in 2021, our objective has been to incorporate drug substance services into our integrated Translational Pharmaceutics platform combining drug product manufacturing and clinical testing.

"By working with customers at the point of candidate nomination, we can now design the most streamlined programmes and significantly accelerate their development timelines.”

The project has seen a former animal testing facility transformed into a drug substance manufacturing lab.

The expansion involved incorporating additional equipment and technologies — significantly expanding the number of new molecules developed each year.

Additional equipment, featuring the latest advances in digital control and data capture, ensures robust transfer from laboratory to multi-kilo scale production.

It delivers multipurpose capacity of up to 15 GMP reactor streams with reactor volumes ranging from five litres up to 150 litres and tactical deployment of batch or continuous flow chemistry technologies to optimise drug substance manufacturing processes.

The facility has been designed adopting Industry 4.0 principles, with the inclusion of a predictive process control system (PharmaMV) improving the transfer from small-scale process research and development (PR&D) into manufacture of multi-kilogram quantities of drug substance for clinical use.

Quotient Sciences Alnwick currently employs 200 people across a range of scientific disciplines, including process chemistry, solid-state characterisation, radiosynthesis, bioanalysis, and formulation development.

The company will continue to expand its capabilities, capacity, and headcount at the site to meet the growing demand for outsourced development and manufacturing services.

In 2021, the site was presented an award for Most Inspirational North East (UK) Science Employer from STEM Learning as part of the STEM Ambassadors program.