Aiken County company invests in equipment to serve international clientele

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A South Carolina manufacturer of peptides is upgrading its North Augusta plant with equipment to help meet demand for its international customer base.

AmbioPharm, which also maintains its headquarters in North Augusta, produces peptide active pharmaceutical ingredients at varying scales, from a gram to kilograms, for some of the world’s largest biotech and pharmaceutical companies as well as customers seeking small batches, according to its website.

Peptides are chains of amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — that are naturally found in your body, according to Health.com. They can also be found in foods, supplements, medications and skincare products.  

“AmbioPharm South Carolina continues growth to meet capacity demands for late phase and commercial peptide production while increasing our sustainability efforts,” the company said in a news release. “In order to meet customer needs, we continue to make state-of-the-art upgrades to our AmbioPharm South Carolina headquarters, including increasing synthesis capacity at this location.”

New equipment includes a high-performance liquid chromatography column, a 1,000-liter lyophilizer, a tangential flow filtration system with centrifuge, a large walk-in stability chamber and a walk-in freezer.

The company said other equipment has been added to increase U.S. production using greener chemistry to support manufacturing, including microwave peptide synthesizers for small and larger capacity production, and chromatography equipment used to improve yield while discarding impurities.

The cost of the capital improvements was not disclosed.

The microwave peptide synthesizers enable this location to perform U.S. crude peptide production for both nonGMP and GMP requirements, with plans for additional synthesis capacity in the future, the news release stated.

Related content: AmbiaPharm in 2017 announced $18 million in capital improvements, including 100 new employees.

“In addition, we have made technology investments in our Quality Organization including the implementation of Master Control as a part of the Quality Management System as we strive to build quality into every step of our process,” AmbioPharm said in the release. “These upgrades allow AmbioPharm to continue to support our customers from early phase toxicology batches through large scale commercial manufacturing, with annual production capacity up to a metric ton. Using our expertise in peptide synthesis, we are able to tackle both simple and complex peptide projects with a proven history of success at research, clinical and commercial scales.”

AmbioPharm produces custom products for research, clinical development, and commercial application for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies worldwide, according to the company website. AmbioPharm also has a manufacturing campus in Shanghai, China.