Hovione’s multimillion-dollar investment in expanding its East Windsor, NJ manufacturing site is quickly coming to fruition. Contract Pharma will be visiting the site later in April 2026 to provide a unique overview of what’s new.

As a preview, the Contract Pharma team met with Hovione at the Drug, Chemical & Associated Technologies Association (DCAT) Week. David Basile, Vice President of Technical Operations—Americas, spoke at the opening Member Company Announcement Forum on March 23, 2026.

In this interview, Basile expands on his remarks at the Announcement Forum. As he explains, Hovione is concentrating not only on New Jersey, but also on facilities in Ireland and Portugal.

Contract Pharma: Good manufacturing practice (GMP) operations will soon be fully operational at the New Jersey facility. How has Hovione progressed through this process since the initial investment cycle was announced last fall—or even prior?

David Basile: It’s been a really great journey and evolution over the last two to three years, conceiving the plan to grow our U.S. footprint. It was one of the reasons I came aboard with Hovione, to grow that footprint and build our commercial manufacturing prowess in the States.

In New Jersey, we had originated [the site] as a tech transfer center. [But] we wanted to grow the organization to be more equivalent with our Portugal and Ireland sites, to do more large-scale manufacturing. So, this is part of that journey. And that’s not just bricks-and-mortar and machinery. It’s been people, talent, partnerships with clients, supporting functions such as QC [quality control] and analytical development.

We’re growing our R&D teams as well. It’s a comprehensive approach to systems, people, and processes.

CP: At the Member Company Announcement Forum, you ran through some of the major technical specifications of the NJ expansion. Can you talk about a few of the highlights and their capabilities?

Basile: This year we’ll be starting up two PSD-3 scale spray dryers. This is a useful scale of machinery for our clients. It plays nicely between the PSD-2 and PSD-4 scales that we have elsewhere in the network. I’d say it’s medium-to-large scale capacity; we could do 30 metric tons annually out of this type of a unit. Product to product, that differs, but we do have products that put that kind of volume out in a PSD-3, so it’s not small-scale.

Customers want to hear this because [they want to gain] efficiency with their batch size, and turnaround time. And when we campaign, we can really see significant throughput with this line up of new machinery and assets.

The first machine that we will start up is a Hastelloy unit, which is unique. We took a pause [in the construction timeline] to make that upgrade, as we had a client that needed this configuration. There are additional clients that are interested in it too, because you can do acidic solutions and more aggressive kinds of formulations as well as solvent-based formulations. So that’s a unique element of that first machine. The second machine is being qualified later this year. Kind of a twin, but this one is standard 316 stainless steel. 

CP: When a company brings a new or expanded facility online, new personnel often accompanies the new tech. What is the workforce addition that you expect, and what are the challenges of retaining top talent?

Basile: In preparation for commissioning and startup of this new equipment, we’ve already ramped our headcount up, to be ready for GMP launch. We’ve added roughly 20 employees in preparation for this first machine to go [live].

Over the next 18-plus months, we could see something on a similar scale, getting us up to that 40–50 headcount range for that facility once it’s fully operational—and more later on in 2028, when we bring in the CDC [continuous direct compression] Flex unit. That’s what’s really going to be transformative about this new facility: that integrated offering coming to life.

CP: Even if the NJ facility is top of mind right now, let’s also touch on some of your plans in Europe. What is your vision for expanding in Europe in the next two to three years?

Basile: Ideally, Hovione’s aim is to build an equivalent manufacturing network, where clients can go to any site across the globe and get a similar breadth and scale of offering. We’re doing that now in Ireland, expanding our PSD-4 scale spray drying. One unit was recently installed. Late last year, it went live.

Then there’s at least one other new PSD-4 in motion, which is really exciting, because [spray dryers] at this site were historically [exclusive to] larger chemistry manufacturing for API [active pharmaceutical ingredient] synthesis. So now, they’re further building their muscle with additional large scale spray drying capacity.

On the Portugal side, there’s a lot of great things going on. Our Tejo campus, in Seixal, Portugal, is a massive, 4.5-million-square-foot plot of land, and there’s a new, modular facility going up there.

It’s incredibly exciting. The design of the facility has been well-thought through with material flows [and] gravity-fed processes. Here, we minimize handling and [maximize] speed of processing. It’s scalable. We call each one of these building segments a finger. You can copy and paste these fingers, and they are built to house both spray drying and drug product assets within each unit.

So, why is that relevant? Because we can easily scale the number of fingers. When customers say, “we need more capacity,” we have the design on the table ready to go. We know how to execute, we know how to build and implement our technology platforms in a short timeframe. Deployment timeframes are truly becoming more and more relevant to our clients.

CP: From last year’s DCAT Week to this year’s, what conversations are you having with industry colleagues about ever-changing geopolitics?

Basile: We’re seeing that local, regional manufacturing capacity is vital. The concept of U.S. for U.S. and China for China seems to be a common theme that our clients are talking about. We happen to have an edge, as we [have already] started our journey of expanding our domestic U.S. capacity.

So I think that’s a crucial piece to the puzzle, having dual-sided Atlantic manufacturing operations. The traditional global supply chain model is being challenged. Having soup-to-nuts sites that are fully autonomous in development, scale-up, tech transfer, all the way to commercial scale operation, is vital to Hovione, and how we’re protecting our supply chain.

[Concerning] starting raw materials and Tier 2 suppliers, our procurement teams are out in the market making sure that there’s no single point of failure for critical materials [like] polymers and solvents that we utilize. We’re managing and mitigating risk by looking at those secondary suppliers across different geographies.

CP: Encapsulating your planned expansions on both sides of the Atlantic, how would you sum up the value to the customer?

Basile: It’s about speed-to-market. It’s one partner from early-phase development, clinical scale, all the way through commercial. They gain comfort, trust, and not just capacity and equipment time; it’s also about competency and depth of scientific expertise.

We’re not just a traditional CDMO. There’s unique expertise in particle science and spray dried dispersions that we offer our clients that they don’t have. [With] traditional CDMOs, customers typically pay for time in [a particular] unit, for example, they’d say: “I need a machine, and I need [it for] three weeks.” Hovione is truly a partner to our clients. They’re leveraging our platforms, our know-how in spray drying, and our know-how in equipment design.

This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.