Agilent Sets Up Dissolution Testing Hub in UK

Agilent Technologies opened the doors of its new Dissolution Centre of Excellence (CoE) based in Craven Arms in the United Kingdom on 12 Oct. 2022 (1). The facility, which has been modernized, will house the company’s dissolution activities under one roof.

Under one roof

The new CoE will be Agilent’s hub for dissolution testing. “The company is bringing all the business functions back under one roof,” said Dan Spisak, marketing manager for the Dissolution Division at Agilent Technologies, during an interview with Pharmaceutical Technology Europe at the opening of the company’s Dissolution CoE facility. “With a lot of investment happening in the dissolution business, it just makes sense right now.”

In terms of geographical location, the UK provides access to multiple different time zones, remarked Steve O’Donohue, director of Agilent Technology’s Craven Arms site, in the interview. It is possible to connect with the United States, Europe, and Asia, with reasonable ease, for example. “Apart from the time zone benefit, then the choice of location comes down to the expertise of the staff,” O’Donohue continued.

“There are many centres of excellence within Agilent,” added Tom Van de Goor, director R&D, Agilent Technologies during the interview. “Each product family has some home somewhere in the world. It is more that all these functions are together in one place because that’s where the centre of knowledge is and that is where decisions can be made on these products.”

Plans for growth and sustainability

Infrastructure has been put in place at the new facility in Craven Arms to facilitate expansion. “We’ve got the expansion space for production, and we’ve got lots of expansion space to house R&D and support staff required to bring that full centre of excellence together,” stated O’Donohue.

However, a key area that needs to be considered from day one of any new facility design is how to make the facility more sustainable, O’Donohue emphasized. “Facility design has definitely moved on from product-centred initiatives to now have sustainability considerations built into the concepts of new designs,” he said.

And sustainability is also driven by the customer who is asking more questions of companies on their initiatives in this area, explained Van de Goor. “The whole sustainability topic, environmental sustainability, is going to play a big role in the coming years,” he summarized.

Reference

1. Agilent Technologies, “Agilent Opens Center of Excellence for Dissolution Products,” Press Release, 12 Oct. 2022.

About the author

Felicity Thomas is the European/senior editor for Pharmaceutical Technology Group.

Article details

Pharmaceutical Technology Europe
Vol. 34, No. 12
December 2022
Page: 28

Citation

When referring to this article, please cite it as F. Thomas, “Agilent Sets Up Dissolution Testing Hub in UK,” Pharmaceutical Technology Europe 34 (12) 2022.