Olon Ricerca Bioscience is a US-based Contract Research Organisation (CRO) offering speciality chemical manufacturing capabilities.
We spoke to Alessandro Agosti, Senior Director of Scientific Operations about how they partner with customers.
The CRO was founded 1986, before being acquired by Olon SpA in 2017. Now part of the wider Olon Group, Alessandro explains that clients can now tap into a “one stop shop” taking them from early phase work to scaling-up to full commercial manufacturing by leveraging Olon’s technologies and centre of excellence.
Olon Ricerca Bioscience in numbers
100+
Analytical Instruments
82k
Square Feet of plant and processing facility
200
Audits successfully passed with clients and US FDA
Speed to market
Speed of development is a top requirement, says Alessandro, sharing an example of a recent collaboration with a US-based pharma company to develop an oncology drug. This project escalated quickly from a very early phase to full GMP manufacturing within one year.
“It was a quite a big jump in terms of scale. It was made possible because of the continuous interaction between the different teams fine-tuning the process, the analytical work, and the process engineering that is inevitably needed when you go from a few 100 grammes to manufacturing batches on a large scale.”
Moving from China
“A trend that that we are seeing from many clients is the requirement to move research and manufacturing away from the Far East” says Alessandro.
While acknowledging this comes with a higher price tag, moving research to the United States is “has clear advantages in terms of control and interaction with customers” he says, adding that local partners are often critical in order to “deliver first time and keep to the timelines.”
A research and scale-up partnership
“We like to provide clients with a roadmap for their development, partnering from a very early stage.” says Alessandro.
“This includes the way we write the proposal, the way we try to understand the client’s most immediate needs. That will drive and impact the way we do process development.”
“We want to think that there might be a much larger scale-up required further down the road, and we believe that establishing a partnership rather than selling a product is the key to a successful working relationship.”
Stay ahead of trends and best practices
