The Dutch firm, which provides high-throughput crystallisation services to pharma companies, said it will add 2,500 sq. ft of laboratory and office space in order to have room for the expected strong growth of its business.

"Pharma companies are increasingly relying on outsourcing as high-throughput crystallisation is a really specialised type of work, and they don't necessarily have the adequate resources and capacity," Tom van Aken, Avantium CEO, told Outsourcing-Pharma.com.

"There is a growing need for this type of technology as drug makers need to know more about the solid forms of active pharmaceutical ingredients before a drug is manufactured."

Avantium expects the higher demand to be global as currently 40 per cent of its business comes from the US, 40 per cent from European countries and 20 per cent is generated in Asia, said van Aken.

He added that there is a higher amount spent on crystallisation in particular as mirrored in the 40 per cent annual growth his company has experienced.

Control over solid form throughout the drug development process is crucial as it has been increasingly scrutinised by regulators in the past few years as more sensitive and quantitative solid-state analytical methods have become accessible, including high-throughput crystallisation.

This method is an approach to solid form generation, where large arrays of compositions are processed in parallel and at small scale to reduce the amount of material used.

While high-throughput screening is widely applied in the pharmaceutical industry, in particular in the drug discovery arena, the application of high-throughput technologies to drug development, especially solid form screening, is a fairly recent trend.

With this new expansion - which represents the largest investment in the company's history - Avantium said it plans to remain focused on crystallisation, although the firm intends to develop further its co-crystallisation business.

Co-crystallisation consists of crystallising two active pharmaceutical ingredients together - instead of formulating them together - to get a more soluble compound.

"Co-crystallisation represents 20 per cent of Avantium's business but it is an emerging science and represents a new interesting area," said van Aken.