CDMO SK Pharmteco has completed two advanced manufacturing facilities at its production campus in Swords, Ireland, significantly expanding its pharmaceutical ingredient capabilities.
The company first announced plans for a phased expansion at the Swords campus back in 2022, earmarking $35 million for the initial phase of the upgrade.
One of the two new buildings is a high-potency active pharmaceutical ingredient facility, which will also cover work on antibody-drug conjugate payloads for the growing ADC market.
The HPAPI facility has been designed to handle extremely potent compounds with occupational exposure limits as low as 10 ng/m3, at batch sizes between 0.5 kg and 1.5 kg.
The new building comes equipped with glass reactor capacity up to 30 litres, plus both rigid and flexible isolators and high-pressure chromatography, tray drying and freeze-drying capabilities.
SK Pharmteco said the new facility’s proximity to the Swords campus’s existing ultra-high potency lab will enable greater continuity from clinical development through to commercial production.
The second new building is a multi-purpose small-molecule API facility, adding around 26.5 m3 of reactor capacity through the addition of three 8,000-litre glass-lined batch bioreactors.
That facility has also been designed to accommodate future capacity and containment expansions, giving SK Pharmteco room to scale operations further as client demand grows.
“These two facilities will expand our capacity to safely handle HPAPIs and scale critical therapies from clinical development through global commercial supply,” said Declan Hunnigan, SK’s Europe small molecule site head and general manager.
A unit of SK Holdings originally acquired the Swords site through a deal with Bristol Myers Squibb back in 2017, establishing its European small-molecule manufacturing presence.
The completions arrive amid a broader wave of HPAPI capacity investment across the pharmaceutical contract manufacturing sector during 2026.
Swiss manufacturing powerhouse Lonza recently announced it would invest an undisclosed sum to bolster HPAPI capacity and establish new commercial-scale ADC capabilities at its hub in Visp, Switzerland.
Eurofins CDMO Alphora also recently announced plans to add 627 square feet of production space at its plant in Mississauga, Canada, designed to accommodate walk-in fume hoods and 100-litre glass reactors.
As with both Lonza and Eurofins, SK Pharmteco did not disclose the final total investment figure for its Ireland expansion project.