Serving the biotech industry Texor

SERVING THE

BIOTECH INDUSTRY

Texor AB, based in the Swedish town of Lycksele, manufactures advanced scientific equipment for the life sciences industry. Joseph Altham spoke to Josef Alenius, the quality and project manager at Texor, to find out about a small company whose high standards of production attract custom from all over the world.

Texor is a contract manufacturing company specialising in the production of chromatography columns for the biotech industry. Texor was originally part of Alfa Laval. Today it is owned by the Swedish investment trust, Lifco, but Alfa Laval is still an important customer. In 2007 Texor acquired a subsidiary, Zetterströms, which manufactures condensors, fermentation vessels and other stainless steel products for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Altogether the Texor Group employs around 80 people.

Although a small company, Texor has an international customer base, with clients in Asia and South America as well as in Europe. Texor’s chromatography columns are supplied to larger manufacturers who then sell them on to the biopharmaceutical industry. “We are purely a subcontractor,” said Mr Alenius. “We just make products on behalf of our customers – we don’t make any products of our own. Our customers will sell the chromatography columns to biopharmaceutical companies to be used in the production of cancer drugs and insulin.”

Quality

Ultimately, therefore, the work of Texor’s engineers contributes to healing the sick and saving lives. Medicine is a sensitive area of industry where any kind of contamination can have potentially catastrophic consequences. For this reason, the standards of quality that Texor has to meet are very severe. Aside from some plastic parts, everything that Texor produces is made from stainless steel. Stainless steel, as Mr Alenius explains, is robust enough to stand up to the demanding production conditions in the biopharmaceutical industry. “Stainless steel is needed because the industry uses a lot of aggressive chemicals. The chemicals used for cleaning can be very aggressive to the material. The parts must be fully cleanable and we can do various kinds of surface treatment like electropolishing and passivation.”

Texor’s chromatography columns are built to suit the demands of the end-user and Texor works closely with its clients on the development of a new machine. “We need to work out with customers what materials will be used. There are extensive demands for documentation. The raw materials must be traceable and obtained from specified suppliers. Plastics have to be especially tested for the medical industry. It is absolutely essential to get everything right at the very beginning. If any of the raw materials were to the wrong specifications, this could wreck the entire project.” With 12 CNC machines’ Texor can cut pieces to a high degree of precision. The chromatography columns are assem-

bled in a controlled environment and the air within the assembly area of the factory is filtered. “Filtered air keeps out any dust or particles while we are doing the assembly. We use deionised water for pressure testing and cleaning.”

Even in the current economic climate, Texor is unlikely to be offering any cut-price deals. “Of course, my customers are conscious of costs but each column is made to customer specifications and quality always comes first.”

Clients and markets

Within the life sciences sector, Texor’s largest customers are Tetra Pak, Alfa Laval and GE Healthcare Life Sciences. For the food industry, Texor makes parts for packaging and process machines. “We make valves and other parts for homogenisers. We sell individual components to a lot of different customers. Nowadays, the demands from the food sector are becoming as strict as the demands from the life sciences industry.”

Texor’s decades of experience of working with the biotech industry have helped the company to establish a worldwide reputation. Texor is able to comply with the relevant national standards in China and the United States and the chromatography columns are shipped to customers in countries as far away as South Korea, India and Brazil. We have very few competitors with the same ability to meet all the regulatory requirements and required standards of quality.”

Trends

Josef Alenius says that he has observed a major change in the biopharmaceutical industry over the last few years. Increasingly, biopharmaceutical companies are moving production to Asia. “Asia has the fastest-growing population in the world and the four or five biggest medical companies have all established factories in Asia. When we receive orders for a new chromatography column for a European facility, it’s generally for a replacement machine. But when we ship chromatography columns to Asia, it’s more likely to be a machine that will be installed in a new factory.”

If production is shifting more and more into Asia, then why does the biopharmaceutical industry still have to obtain chromatography columns from Europe? The simple answer, says Josef Alenius, is Texor’s unrivalled quality of production. In any case, Texor’s location in Lapland is far less remote than it sounds. During project development, Texor maintains close contact with its customers by telephone and over the Internet. Shortly after Mr Alenius spoke to Industry Europe, he was due to receive a visit from some end customers from India for inspection of some large scale columns. n