Clariant establishes new pharma technology centre

Speciality chemical company Clariant is to establish a research-based technology centre that will support the pharmaceutical industry in the commercialisation of new drugs.

Located at Clariant's Hoechst facilities in Frankfurt, Germany, the centre will house some 50 research and production personnel and will focus on technology development, targeted process development and broad-spectrum small-scale manufacturing to meet the Phase I and Phase II requirements of pharmaceutical producers.

The new facility will bring together a broad cross-section of technologies, including organometallics, chirals, biocatalysis, cryogenic synthesis and couplings and condensations that exploit the potential of Clariant's T3P coupling agent. Clariant has recently made substantial investments in a kilo-scale production facility and other multipurpose synthesis capability at this location.

According to Dr. Manfred Koch, technology director for Clariant Pharmaceuticals, housing this spectrum of development chemists in a single facility has the effect of developing synergies between classical and innovative approaches. In the area of process development, technology centre personnel work with technology packages supplied by customers or can be asked to develop routes themselves based on specific compounds. 'With chemists of different backgrounds working together in the same laboratories, we find that we can achieve rapid optimisation in both simple and more complex reactions as part of overall route development. Our success in finding solutions for our customers becomes even more predictable,' Koch said.

One of the primary goals for the technology centre will be to refine and develop innovative technologies where Clariant is a market leader and to put those technologies to work in offering synthesis solutions to customers. 'Increasingly, we see the pharmaceutical industry looking for outsourcing partners that can achieve very specific synthesis targets through the use of a broad and flexible tool box,' said Ralf Pfirmann, global director for market management, Clariant Pharmaceuticals. 'At the same time, they are also looking for synthesis solutions that add a great deal of value in an economic manner.'