After witnessing generic drug quality issues during visits to Asian manufacturing facilities and wrestling with dwindling domestic production capacity and foreign pricing fluctuations, family-run Nexus Pharmaceuticals found a solution a half hour north of its Lincolnshire, Illinois, headquarters.
This summer, the company opened a generic specialty injectables manufacturing plant on 16 acres in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, joining the same corporate park as the soon-to-open Haribo gummi bear manufacturing plant, its first in North America.
Founded in 2003, Nexus was 100% virtual, relying on contract manufacturers to produce the drugs they formulated for hospitals and distributors.
But as more pharmaceutical companies began moving manufacturing abroad to capitalize on cheap labor and fewer environmental regulations, Nexus took note of the poor quality and sharp price spikes of drugs made in China and India. Over the last decade, production of most generic injectables has moved to those countries.
"Since 2002, imports from India have increased 35-fold and imports from China 135-fold," Ahmed said.
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