Pacira Pharmaceuticals enters into co-production partnership with Patheon for Exparel

Under the co-production partnership agreements, Pacira and Patheon will collaborate to construct dedicated Exparel manufacturing suites in Patheon’s specialty sterile manufacturing facility in Swindon.

The first additional Exparel manufacturing suite at Patheon, which is expected to come online in two to three years’ time, will be designed to mirror the recently approved Suite C manufacturing facility at the Pacira Science Center Campus in San Diego, providing, at scale, approximately $300 million of additional product manufacturing capacity, or an aggregate $700m worth of overall production capacity for Exparel.

The design and production scale of the second additional manufacturing suite will be determined at a future date.

Patheon will be responsible for the construction of the dedicated manufacturing suites, installation and validation of the manufacturing equipment and the commercial manufacture of Exparel.

Pacira will oversee the design and purchase of the dedicated Exparel manufacturing equipment to be installed in the Patheon facility, lead the technical transfer of the manufacturing process and govern, with on-site and other personnel, the oversight and optimization of the proprietary DepoFoam-based manufacturing process.

Pacira president, CEO and chairman Dave Stack noted that Patheon has a long history of excellence in manufacturing sterile injection products.

"With EXPAREL on a growth trajectory, we are confident that Patheon will ensure our ability to continue supplying EXPAREL to the marketplace beyond the capacity of our current Science Center manufacturing facility in San Diego," Stack added.