ENTERPRISE SPONSOR: Oral Solid Dose (OSD)
Avara, one of That's Nice's Road to 2021 sponsors, discusses how the company is envisioning the future of the pharma/biopharma industry.
As pharmaceutical companies look to maximize efficiency of operations in order to invest in the research and development of new products, we see the desire to form strategic partnerships with CMOs like ours becoming even more prevalent. At Avara, on-hand leadership teams and streamlined processes allow us to develop more timely responses and solutions to our clients’ needs. This, in turn, helps us nurture these relationships into long-term partnerships, as client and CMO objectives become more aligned.
Today, Avara is investing in enhancements to existing capabilities and service offerings. For example, we are expanding our capacities for blending, granulation, compression, and coating of OTC products at our Aiken, South Carolina, facility. In Arecibo, Puerto Rico, we recently completed serialization on our high-speed bottling line to support the release of Rx products for international markets. In Norman, Oklahoma, we are further improving our suite of spray-drying capabilities and have added encapsulation equipment to the facility. In our sterile service offering in Liscate, Italy, we have introduced new cartoning equipment for integrated packaging to support new business.
The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged businesses worldwide to adjust the way they interact. We’ve seen a greater reliance on video conferencing and have provided solutions to our clients by offering virtual site visits and audits as opposed to more traditional, in-person customer collaboration. While we believe that in-person meetings will resume after the pandemic — especially in the introductory phase — we anticipate that the practice of more frequent, remote conferencing will become more standard as projects progress.
At Avara, we have been supporting clients by delivering on expedited timelines and remaining responsive to their requests and needs.
Looking Beyond 2020
This year has presented a multitude of challenges to businesses worldwide, resulting in changes being driven to a broad range of processes. In particular, we have seen a higher number of discussions around Emergency Use Authorizations with our clients, as the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic create urgency in the sector to advance drug regulatory approvals. At Avara, we have been supporting clients by delivering on expedited timelines and remaining responsive to their requests and needs. As we move toward 2021, we have fine-tuned many of our processes, resulting in optimization across all departments — from Supply Chain to Finance — to support “speed to market” in our industry.
For the wider community, awareness of the importance of accelerating the introduction of new products to the market has grown significantly as countries around the world support collaborative efforts to remove obstacles within drug research, clinical trial, and drug approval processes. The engagement with regulatory authorities during 2020 has been key, and we believe that these industry and politically motivated changes will have the most lasting impact to the R&D and pharmaceutical manufacturing sectors, as companies are encouraged to fast-track critical drug supplies to the patients who need them.
As Avara continues to grow through the next decade, we envision broadening our services and offerings to complement our core capabilities of OSD (Rx and OTC) and sterile commercial manufacturing and packaging, thus enabling Avara to engage with our clients earlier in the product life cycle. We look forward to continuing to evolve and adapt our business to meet the needs of our clients and the industry as a whole.
