On 10 September, Basel-headquartered CordenPharma announced an €80 million multi-year expansion at its Caponago site near Milan, Italy. Through the acquisition of adjacent property, the installation of new isolator filling lines and expanded packaging and analytical capabilities, the company aims to raise total sterile injectable capacity at the site to as much as 500 million units per year.
The €80 million figure covers the wider investment programme. As part of that plan, CordenPharma has completed a €13 million purchase of an adjacent 11,000-square-metre commercial building and 26,000 square metres of land. The transaction closed on 28 July and increased the site’s footprint by more than 50%.
The new space can accommodate at least four aseptic filling lines, four visual-inspection lines and four additional packaging lines. It can also support large-scale lyophilisation, customer-owned equipment and auto-injector assembly.
Planned formats include pre-filled syringes, liquid and lyophilised vials, cartridges and auto-injectors. The flexible layout is intended to accommodate products with different containment, filling, inspection and packaging requirements.
CordenPharma is also installing two new isolator lines within an existing operational area. One will handle clinical and small-scale commercial batches of syringes, vials and cartridges. The second is a high-speed pre-filled syringe and cartridge line capable of producing more than 500,000 units per day. Completion is targeted for mid-2027 and 2028 respectively.
The expansion is aimed at peptides, GLP-1 therapies, oligonucleotides, lipid nanoparticles, biosimilars and other biologic products. These modalities require specialised sterile processing, accurate filling, material compatibility and, in many cases, tightly controlled temperature and handling conditions.
The project is therefore about more than adding fill-and-finish volume. CordenPharma already operates capabilities across peptides, oligonucleotides, customised lipid excipients, LNPs, small molecules and highly potent APIs. Expanding injectable capacity allows the company to connect drug-substance production, delivery systems and final sterile dosage forms within a broader CDMO network.
The annual figure of 500 million units is a projected total capacity after the expansion, not output currently available to customers. The pace of capacity release will depend on equipment installation, qualification, regulatory inspection, technology transfer and the conversion of customer projects into commercial production.
Global CDMO investment is accelerating around GLP-1 medicines, peptides and complex biologics. Additional European capacity could ease some fill-and-finish constraints, but it will also intensify competition among European, North American and Asian contractors for customers, specialised equipment and experienced manufacturing staff.
