Somerset-based Catalent on Thursday said it started a $175 million project to expand its flagship U.S. manufacturing facility in Winchester, Kentucky.
Two new buildings, expected to be completed by January 2024, will add 107,000 square feet to the site’s manufacturing footprint. When complete and fully operational, it is expected the expansions will create as many as 277 new jobs, adding to the existing workforce of over 650.
The expansion will broaden the site’s highly potent material handling capabilities and containment vault, provide additional laboratory space and add further capacity for existing turnkey operations, including dual fill encapsulation and pan coating alongside a variety of packaging solutions and analytical services.
These latest expansions follow a doubling of the site’s footprint, to 190,000 square feet in 2015, and a $40 million investment in 2019 that saw the installation of new equipment for stick pack dosage manufacturing, integrated packaging lines, as well as expanded roller compaction and fluid bed capacity.
“We are witnessing a broad increase in demand for manufacturing, and the nature of the development pipeline being strong in both oncology treatments and complex molecules, necessitates the expansion of specific capabilities in areas such as highly potent materials handling,” Aris Gennadios, president of softgel & oral technologies at Catalent, said. “Our Winchester site has a rich history in the successful commercialization of new products, and this expansion is the latest in a series of strategic investments, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, to ensure that the current and future needs of our customers can be met.”
Opened in 1992, Catalent’s Winchester facility has evolved into one of the industry’s premier sites for complex oral drug formulation and manufacturing. The site has launched more than 150 new products into the market since its inception and produces over 3 billion tablets and capsules annually.
