Roquette Opens Pharmaceutical Innovation and Training Center in Philadelphia
The new site will support closer collaboration with customers in the US and provide best practice training and drive innovation in the field.
By Mark Terry
June 22, 2023
Roquette, headquartered in La Madeleine, France, recently cut the ribbon on its new Pharmaceutical Innovation Center located near Philadelphia. The new $25 million center will complement the company’s existing innovation centers in France and Singapore to offer services and training to pharma companies in the U.S.
Roquette works in several areas, including food & nutrition, animal nutrition, and industrial markets. But it also works in biopharma, pharma and nutraceuticals, with a broad range of plant-based excipients, i.e., inactive substances that act as vehicles or mediums for a drug.
“We’re a pioneer in plant proteins and a leading provider of pharma excipients,” James Bozikis, Head of Communications and Public Affairs, Roquette Americas, told BioBuzz. “We operate in more than 100 countries and globally employ over 8,000 people. But everything we do is all raw materials from nature. It’s potatoes, peas, wheat, corn, cellulose, so it’s all-natural.”
The goal of the new center is to support existing client relationships that have products, primarily in solid-oral dosage forms, such as tablets, capsules, syrups and oral suspensions. Roquette sells its excipients to these companies, but the Innovation Center will train scientists and troubleshoot problems.
Peter Freed, PhD, Head of Global Pharma Customer Technical Support, for Roquette, told BioBuzz, “We offer training to pharma companies that have, perhaps, junior scientists that need experience, need training on how to make a tablet or what excipients to select for various dosage forms. And we also train our distributors and our internal staff.”
That is one dimension of the Pharmaceutical Innovation Center. Another is troubleshooting.
Vinod Tuliani, PhD, Head of Global Pharmaceutical Services, who will head the new center, told BioBuzz, “The other part is also helping customers solve their problems. We have a large suite of excipients for different applications, and we have the expertise in-house to help solve customer problems. Some of it is obviously based on literature, but we have the ability to put this to the test in our labs with the customer present who can see any limitations with their current formulation. And we can present some solutions that we have that will help them overcome those limitations. We can demonstrate that to them in real life and help them optimize whatever they need to optimize.”
When looking to open an Innovation Center in the U.S., Roquette looked at approximately 35 sites around the Eastern Seaboard but knew that many of its existing customers were in the Philadelphia area. Bozikis said, “If they’re working through an issue or a problem, they can come here and work with our team to find solutions. We wanted to be here near the customers, near the people we want to work with and collaborate with. And that’s where, as we’re growing our business in the Americas, we decided to locate our R&D and customer technical support team in the heart of our customers.”
Currently, the center has four formulation scientists, but Free said, “We plan to expand pretty rapidly. By the end of 2024, we expect to have about 20 scientists as employees, as well as other administration people, sales and marketing, and executives.”
The company is currently hiring at the Philadelphia site.
Tuliani said, “I think Boston as well as San Francisco, the Bay Area, tends to get a lot of buzz because of the biotech industry. We’re more focused currently on pharma, which is more the traditional dosage forms that you’re used to seeing, the small molecules that go into tablets, capsules and liquid suspensions. Having said that, there’s still a lot of pretty impressive science that’s required to make even these dosage forms, even though they’re the most traditional forms. But the Philadelphia area has some pretty major players in the pharma industry that have research labs and development scientists.”
That reach, of course, includes companies in New Jersey and Maryland. “It really did check off all the boxes for us,” said Bozikis, “and put us in the heart of the area where our customers were and companies we wanted to work with.”
Tuliani adds, “Don’t forget, there’s a lot of talent in the area, too. That’s important.”
In addition to training and troubleshooting, Tuliani says that they have internal projects for new applications that they are working on. “We currently have those going on in other parts of the world, but we’re going to be ramping up those operations here in Philly so we can come up with some new solutions that are not yet part of our offerings.”
Bozikis told BioBuzz, “We’re really excited about the center and excited to be in this part of the country. We’ve been growing in the Americas, and we wanted to make sure that we provided the same type of service here for our clients as we have in Asia and in Europe. And creating this hub and this center was the best way for us to accomplish that.”
