Corden Pharma Invests for Continued Growth in Boulder
For Brian McCudden, Global Head of Peptide Production at CordenPharma, Colorado offered the right combination of assets for growth, including strong infrastructure, exceptional talent, and a thriving life sciences community.
CordenPharma, a Swiss Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization (CDMO) with six technology platforms and 11 manufacturing facilities in North America and Europe, provides integrated manufacturing of APIs, lipids, drug products, and packaging services. The company supports pharmaceutical and biotech innovators with the complex modalities they need across their drug lifecycle, from development to commercialization.
“The decision to expand was a combination of the really good infrastructure that we already have in place and the ability to expand,” says McCudden.
The company is investing $500 million to expand its Boulder site, adding more than 200 employees to its current staff of 700 and increasing its footprint by 50%. “Fundamentally, you could argue that we will be close to doubling our output (with this expansion),” McCudden says. The first phase is planned to come online in 2026, with full completion in 2028.
“Being in Boulder also enables us to attract and retain talent,” says McCudden, whose team recruits the majority of employees from Colorado schools. He views the region’s growing life sciences ecosystem as an advantage: “The more companies you have in an area that are doing similar things encourages a wider talent pool.”
Demand for peptides has surged with the rise of GLP-1 agonists for weight loss and diabetes, as well as treatments in oncology and radiopharmaceuticals. Because the development and manufacturing of peptides is highly specialized and not a lot of pharmaceutical companies have the expertise or capacity to develop and manufacture them, McCudden sees outsourced peptide production as an area of continued growth for the company.
Colorado’s supportive environment and the U.S. 36 Collaborative’s regional partnerships continue to fuel this momentum, advancing innovation, expansion, and opportunity along the high-tech U.S. 36 corridor, which includes Boulder, Superior, Lafayette, Louisville, and Broomfield.
