Roche and Aventis reach agreement for shimikic acid, key raw material for Tamiflu
Recently Roche announced it had reached an agreement with Sanofi-aventis to produce shimikic acid by fermentation at Sanofi’s plant in Saint-Aubin-les-Elbeuf France. This is indeed good news since extraction of shikimic acid from the spice star anise (mainly in China) was the bottleneck in the process. The extraction process is about ten steps and takes quite a bit of time. Production from femermentation should alleviate this problem and is probably the only way that Roche could also announce that 13 other contract manufacturers have been identified to produce the drug in case of a world pandemic. While I’m not sure of how likely this is to happen, it is good to see that Roche is taking steps to ensure production can be increased if needed.
Technorati Tags: shikimic acid, Tamiflu
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April 11th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
[…] I recently posted about Roche having additional contract manufacturers lined up to potentially make Tamiflu if needed. […]