R5, located on the BioCity campus in Nottingham, will provide pharma companies with services to make oral dosage forms - tablets, capsules, semi-solids, liquids - in small quantities for use in Phase I and II clinical trials.

"In the short-term we are planning to focus on our oral products segment, where we have already secured four contracts," Paul Titley, R5 CEO, told Outsourcing-Pharma.com.

"However, in the long term, we expect our sterile business to represent the same part."

Titley said R5 plans to soon expand its range of services to sterile injectables, using its new cleanroom, which has been recently built by BioCity.

There is great potential for this kind of services as very few players are currently offering such a wide range of solutions.

"There are very few contract cleanrooms - maybe a dozen - in Europe and the ones currently operating are extremely busy," said Titley.

He added that building such a facility is time and cost consuming and companies usually don't have the resources to embark on such a spree.

But is it a competitive market? "Yes and no", said Titley.

According to Titley, there are currently very few companies who provide most pharmaceutical forms - oral dosage forms and sterile products.

"Most companies have the capacity to make tablets and capsules, but manufacturing injectable products costs a high amount of money."

In addition to manufacturing, the firm also has a lab to analyse data and provides its clients with 24 hour access to their data, thanks to its Shadow project management system - an add-on service which is quite uncommon in the industry, he said.

Through the use of a pre-existing, purpose-built building, which included manufacturing equipment, R5 managed to save a substantial amount of money and was funded with only £500,000 (€730,000) - half of which was injected by Catapult Venture, a firm also located at BioCity. The remainder was provided by directors and business angels, said Titley.

Looking forward, Titley wouldn't give any figures on how much revenue the company is expecting to generate but said he was confident that the comprehensive range of services offered by his company will enable it to differentiate itself from competitors.

"Fortunately, at the moment, our needs are only for working capital and we are currently ahead of the plan, so we are doing better than expected."