Piramal Pharma strives to be a leader in Antibody Drug Conjugates

Piramal Enterprises' pharma solutions division has recently stated its aim to lead the market in Antibody Drug Conjugates (ADCs) over the next five years. This is in lieu of the company's assessment that the market for commercial ADC's is highly under-resourced and will be accelerating over the next five years.

The market will also be in fluxed with new drugs with a steady increase in number of potential drug targets entering the clinical phase.

Piramal has entered its fifth year of commercial production on the first-ever commercial ADC in the market, and in the near future is planning to focus its commercial production on eight drugs- expected by 2020.

This step can be considered to be very significant development as the company manufactures only one commercial product today. "Piramal is targeting winning at least one in every two commercial contracts coming to market over the next few years" the company said in a statement to the press.

"We have set a target of becoming the market leader in ADCs contract commercialisation over the next five years. This is based on our focused investments at our current site in Grangemouth, UK and recent acquisition of Coldstream - a specialised ADC fill/finish site, in Kentucky, USA," the company said in a statement here.

Despite an increase in development targets for ADCs, the global contract manufacturing sector still remains significantly under-resourced, with only a handful of players with experience and even less with the required regulatory accreditations, the release said.

Over the last decade, Piramal has gradually expanded internal teams and has nearly 150 ADCs specialists across its global sites, it said.

"At present, very few CMOs (contract manufacturing organisations) have the facilities or experience to develop them. At the moment there are only two CMOs, including ourselves, which are leading the charge in the commercial manufacturing of ADCs," Piramal Enterprises CEO - Pharma Solutions, Vivek Sharma said.

"We have been in the ADC market for over 10 years, and it is an expertise we have built both organically and inorganically. We see the next 5 years as an exciting time for the ADC market and possibly have a sizeable contribution in the total biological CMO market," he added.