SGS North America Announces Expansion of Biologics Testing Capabilities

SGS North America (SGS) announced today that it has added new capacity and capabilities to bolster its biologics testing services for the American biopharmaceuticals market.

This expansion brings new instrumentation and scientific expertise to the SGS Lincolnshire Center of Excellence, which services pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical, and medical device manufacturers and producers across the United States.

The SGS Center of Excellence in Lincolnshire, Illinois is a 60,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art facility, delivering microbiology, chemistry, and biologics testing and analysis services to support clients with both small and large molecule testing. The site offers innovative biopharmaceutical testing and product quality control solutions for every stage of the product development lifecycle.  These stages span early cell bank safety assessment and product characterization, to method development and raw material testing, all the way through to the final stage of product release.

Through this expansion, SGS has enhanced its instrumentation, its specialized biologics expertise, and its capacity to support characterization of novel biologics and biosimilars. These enhancements also facilitate analytical testing in both the discovery and commercial stages within a single facility, delivering a comprehensive, streamlined, and flexible service delivery approach to clients.  This is timely given the fast-growing needs of biopharmaceutical companies seeking to accelerate getting their drugs to market cost-effectively. This race to market also necessitates the ability to demonstrate that regulatory guidelines are being met, which goes hand in hand with quality and safety assurance. These factors often lead companies to outsource their complex and specialized testing and analysis requirements.

"Biologics constitute a high-growth segment of the pharmaceutical market, with sales and development of biologics-based products more than doubling over the last decade in North America," said Derick Govender, Head of SGS North America. "With the addition of scientific expertise and leading instrumentation at our Lincolnshire site, SGS is bolstering its biologics testing capabilities to better meet the growing demand for large molecule drug products that are supporting rapid advancements in novel drug discovery."

SGS North America is a network of contract service laboratories providing pharmaceutical development, biologics testing and characterization, biosafety, and quality control testing. Its second Center of Excellence, that also delivers biologics testing in North America, is based in Mississauga, Canada. SGS operates 20 laboratories across 11 countries that service the global pharmaceutical industry. In this respect, SGS represents the broadest, wholly owned, global network of contract analytical laboratories for this sector. SGS also delivers solutions for medical-device manufacturers and offers biostatistics and regulatory consultancy.