Olon, an active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) supplier, is creating an R&D hub at its center in Milan, Italy, also home to the company’s headquarters. The company plans to expand and diversify its expertise applied to the development of APIs for the contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) and generics market.

With a €10 million investment, the Italian Group has unveiled the creation of a large area dedicated entirely to research laboratories to be used to develop API manufacturing processes. The investment will create central research hub, integrating with the seven existing Olon research centers, and give rise to a global R&D networking model where the expertise and know-how involved in specific processes, consolidated in the 11 Olon plants worldwide, will be connected, and applied across the group’s entire manufacturing network.

The investment involves the construction of a vast area of laboratories, some of which will focus on furthering the development of new, sustainable technologies, including biocatalysis and photochemistry. It will also support significant growth in the R&D team, with up to 50 new researchers hired, bringing the total number of people assigned to research activities to around 350.

The international research and development hub, which will cover a huge area within its site in Milan, is one of the largest in the group’s network and already highly strategic in terms of expertise in advanced manufacturing processes, such as high containment technologies.

The new hub represents growth in terms of people, expertise and skills, with the objective of boosting internal know-how. Based on integrated data systems, this know-how will enable the company to scale up products faster and to achieve highly flexible and reliable tech transfer from one site to another. It will also facilitate the development of new molecules and innovative synthesis methods and, lastly, help the company attain more competitive process safety standards, thus increasing the safety of plants, constant product quality and ensuring business continuity.

The center will house different areas, each one dedicated to a specific field of application. The hub will include a laboratory for process safety and research into scale-up and transfer processes. It will also have an analytical R&D area, which will broaden expertise for the development of new synthesis methods and new APIs, from the early phase.