The Aenova Group is a leading global contract manufacturer and development service provider for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry. As a one-stop-shop, Aenova develops, produces and packages all common dosage forms, product groups and active ingredient classes from pharmaceuticals to dietary supplements for human and animal health. Microcaps is an innovative, multi-award winning Swiss start-up company that has developed a novel, high-precision microencapsulation technology with scalable production capacity.

Now Aenova and Microcaps are entering into a strategic partnership that will start on October 31, 2022. The aim of the partnership is to accelerate and improve the development and production of pharmaceuticals, food supplements and numerous other products. Microcaps will contribute its expertise in innovative, high-precision microencapsulation. The process uses a patented technology platform that enables customized formulations, e.g. in release, protective coating and texture.

Together with Microcaps' technology, Aenova can offer an even broader range of new product development and life cycle management solutions for micro- and convention capsule formulations, such as enhanced taste masking, controlled release, targeted release, increased bioavailability and improved Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) stability. Aenova as a CDMO (Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization) with a broad portfolio, brings to the partnership long-standing expertise, extensive GMP knowledge, international resources, rapid scalability and effective market access for the technology.

With the EOS 1000 series, Microcaps recently launched the first solution that enables continuous encapsulation of active pharmaceutical ingredients on an industrial scale. At its core, the technology consists of several identical microchannels that can introduce well over 100,000 microcapsules of the same shape, size and properties, thus ensuring the highest quality standards.

As a strategic industrial CDMO partner of Microcaps, Aenova will offer this patented technology for customer projects at its sites, for example in Kirchberg, Switzerland, or Cornu, Romania. Kirchberg is specialized as a Competence Center for the development and production of pharmaceutical soft capsules within the Aenova Group. Highly potent active pharmaceutical ingredients up to OEB 5 can also be processed there in softgel capsules, for which the innovative technology of microcaps offers new possibilities for specific customer requirements. The Cornu site is a competence center for the production of softgel capsules and Aenova VegaGels®. Here, Microcaps' novel microencapsulation technology can be used to improve the bioavailability of active food ingredients, e.g. vitamins, vegetable and essential oils, cannabidiol and others.

The two managing directors of the new partners, Jan Kengelbach, CEO of Aenova Group, which is the industry partner of the cooperation, and Michael Hagander, co-founder and co-CEO of the startup company Microcaps, agree: "In our now launched partnership, the whole is clearly more than the sum of its parts, because the portfolio and the experience and knowledge of the individual companies complement each other perfectly in order to be able to offer even better added value for our customers in the pharmaceutical as well as the food industry even faster."

At this year's CPhI, you can find out more about the new partnership from November 1 to 3, 2022 in Frankfurt/Main at the Aenova in Hall 9, booth no. 90J60.