Bora Pharmaceuticals is a global contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO), providing development and manufacturing services to the pharmaceutical industry. With 2,500 employees across 10 sites globally, distributing to more than 100 markets, its commitment to sustainability has become a “right to operate” for the pharmaceutical companies Bora works with. J.D. Mowery, President of Bora Pharmaceuticals’ CDMO Division, explains how the group shares best practices across its sites, and plans for its recent strategic acquisition in Baltimore, set to become Bora’s flagship facility for fill-finish services.
JD Mowery: Bora Pharmaceuticals is a global CDMO. We provide development and manufacturing services to the pharmaceutical industry. We have 10 sites around the world, around 2,500 employees, we distribute to more than 100 markets.
We produce small molecule, large molecule; we do fill-finish, all different kinds of dosage forms.
Our mission is to really improve lives around the world – we want to be a partner for biotech and pharma, to help make sure that as many patients as possible are treated. And when we think about sustainability it’s both an ethical obligation, but it’s also an expectation of the industry.
As we work with more and more pharmaceutical companies, their expectation is that we’re being a good steward of the resources that we have available to us, and we’re really taking great care of the environments that we’re working within.
JD Mowery: Sustainability’s important for Bora Pharmaceuticals for many reasons, one of which is, you know, our board has made sure that it’s something that we stay focused on from a governance perspective. We want to make sure that we’re doing the best we can to leverage our resources, because it is an ethical obligation, but also because it’s a right to operate for our pharmaceutical companies that we’re working with.
We’re seeing more and more within the industry that, you know, some of the larger pharmaceutical companies, it’s an expectation. When they’re looking for companies to partner with, they expect us to prioritise sustainability just as much as they do.
Our site in Mississauga is probably the most mature site, from a sustainability perspective. They’re probably the most robust programme that we have, and they’re kind of the role model when it comes to sustainability.
Mississauga has a goal of becoming SDTI certified in 2025. And then when we think about the APAC region, Zhunan has increased capacity, but they’ve also been able to reduce their thermal oxidation by 38 percent. So obviously quite impressive to have those types of lofty goals from a sustainability perspective.
The Baltimore site here is part of the Bora family just as of August 2024. It was previously an Emergent site that we acquired; we brought it in to the Bora network to serve as a fill-finish site for sterile manufacturing for large molecule as well as small molecule.
It was a strategic play to allow us to start to service our customers for a longer piece of the value chain. So a customer that we were previously manufacturing drug substance for on the large molecule side of things, we’ll actually be able to help them to go all the way through to the drug product step.
The sustainability team is here to visit the Baltimore site, and one of the things that we want to understand is: where are we today, from an emissions perspective? We’re coming up on the one year anniversary, so they’ll be here to collect some samples and understand where it fits, and what opportunities we have to continue to improve the site.
The next few months and years for the site are very exciting. The FlexPro line that was invested in by the previous owners, Emergent, that’s a high speed isolator line that we’ll be bringing online in the next couple of weeks.
The board just recently approved an AST, fully automated isolator line that’ll do vials, syringes and cartridges, so that construction will be underway by July, and it’ll be coming online by the end of the year. That’ll allow us to manufacture clinical as well as orphan and small-scale commercial products.
And then obviously we’ve got ongoing commercial supply for close to 20 customers. So there’ll be a lot happening here in the Baltimore site. Continuing to train people, continuing to enhance the abilities of the site. But it’s exciting times here at the facility.
We truly believe that this site can be one of the flagship facilities for the Bora network. It’s kind of our first delve into fill-finish. We know we’ll need additional capacity elsewhere in North America, likely in Europe, as well as in the APAC region. But this will be what we use as that role model site.
We think about what we’re doing this year – bringing the FlexPro line on, the installation of the AST isolator line – it poises this facility to really be able to take what we’re doing to the next level.
We’ll be able to service the needs of our customers for years to come. But we also understand that within the next couple of years we’ll likely need to install a high speed line, greater than 100-150 vials per minute. We also know that from a capacity perspective, many of our customers are forecasting units per year that we would need to grow as well. So we’ll have to have that in mind, whether it’s the expansion of this facility, maxmising the footprint of this facility.
So we’re going to continue to learn and to maximise our opportunities and efficiencies here. But we know that this is kind of, what Bora can be. And this site will be that role model for both us and for our customers, to show what Bora’s capabilities are in continuing to service and really treat customers differently than what they’ve seen elsewhere within the CDMO industry.