Kemwell, India’s leading pharmaceutical contract manufacturer, has set up a new R&D facility in Bangalore, India, in partnership with the world’s leading pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). This R&D centre has been set up to cater to GSK’s global oral healthcare development projects.
GSK’s sales in oral care amounted to £1,049m in 2007. Its leading oral care products are toothpastes and mouthwashes under the Aquafresh, Sensodyne, Macleans and Odol brand names. GSK Consumer Healthcare (CH) has an aggressive target to significantly grow the business by 2013. To enable this to happen, the R&D arm of the company has committed to doubling the number of projects running through its pipeline. A series of initiatives have been identified within CH R&D to enable this target to be achieved. Specifically, a global resourcing (GR) department has been established to identify and qualify contractors in India to increase the capacity for delivering new products through to the launch phase.
Kemwell has been selected by GR as a preferred partner for the development of oral care products. Kemwell achieved this privileged status through their senior management commitment to diversification / innovation, their ability to deliver a new GMP facility, skilled manpower and their commitment to planning, delivery and quality. GSK and Kemwell share a relationship that spans over 20 years and have collaborated on several pharmaceutical manufacturing projects in the past. They are now extending their relationship to meet the R&D demands of GSK.
The newly established oral care unit (OCU) at Kemwell is a state-of-the-art GMP facility suitable for all requisite development activities prior to technical transfer of product for manufacture into a GSK facility. The facility and staffing have been put in place by Kemwell in little over six months and the unit is now fully operational.
In recognition of the Kemwell’s outstanding achievement in making the OCU operational, Greg Grashoff, director of global resourcing CH R&D, C R Ravi, manager of global resourcing, attended the official opening of the Kemwell OCU on 19 November 2008. Upon cutting the ribbon to open the facility, Greg commented on the commitment of the senior Kemwell team in providing excellent customer-focused service. Greg gave special mention to Kemwell’s senior management team – Subhash Bagaria (chairman), Anurag
Bagaria (VP), SK Raman (COO) and Dr Ram Bhat (leader of the oral care unit). In addition he recognised the contribution made by GSK staff in this exciting endeavour,
particularly Brendan Marken (VP for new product development), Ravi and Steve Alexander (NPD group leader) plus a large team from GSK R&D in both the UK and India who worked in a great collaborative fashion with Kemwell team to deliver this project.
Subhash Bagaria, chairman and MD, Kemwell, said: “Aligning interests and implementing client-specific investments are some of the methods that Kemwell uses to
lower outsourcing costs for our customers and ensure long-term success of the partnerships.”
Kemwell is further investing in infrastructure to provide R&D services such as formulation and analytical services, stability studies and clinical trial manufacturing in various dosage forms.