West Expands Research and Development Center

“The customer-focused activities at the advanced development center will enable West to optimize product development and manufacturing processes so we can help customers meet their business objectives, such as quality by design initiatives,” said Fran DeGrazio, Vice President, Marketing and Strategic Business Development, West. “Our goal continues to be providing innovative packaging system components and drug administration solutions. One way we do that is to understand and eliminate variation in our products, which helps our customers reduce their exposure to risk. As quality requirements increase, global pharmaceutical manufacturers are seeking early partnerships with packaging manufacturers such as West to help mitigate risk by building quality into the product from research and development through delivery of the drug to the patient.”

“This investment enables us to continue to support our customers' requirements for extremely clean pharmaceutical packaging and delivery system components by introducing new innovative technologies and by building on our established technologies, including the Westar® ready-to-use process, FluroTec® barrier film and Envision® automated vision inspection system,” said Tyson Popp, Vice President, Research and Development, West.

The advanced development center will feature the newest technologies for mixing, compounding, molding and finishing elastomer packaging components. West expects the advanced development center to be on-line by October 2011.