For a growing company that provides custom development and manufacturing services for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, Wilmington isn’t just a place to call home.

It’s also the site of brisk expansion.

Speaking after tours in June that gave local officials a glimpse of the company’s buildings and operations, Alcami CEO Stephan Kutzer said Wilmington is where the company’s headquarters is, where 400 of the firm’s 1,000 total employees are based and “where we are trying to have the fastest growth within the company.”

One of the main focuses of the event June 21 was to unveil a recent change in one of its numerous facilities off 23rd Street.

Alcami, formerly known as AAIPharma Services Corp./Cambridge Major Laboratories Inc., recently finished converting nearly 5,000 square feet of a mainly unused portion in its headquarters building at 2320 Scientific Drive to new laboratory space.

The new lab space is a sign of expansion, including adding new employees in Wilmington, company leaders said.

“We’ve already hired ... over 40 people in the last year, and a lot of those people have been trained to be a part of this laboratory so we’re very anxious and excited to be able to occupy this space in the near future,” said Brad Catalone, senior director of laboratory services for Alcami, during a tour that included numerous local officials and business leaders.  

Catalone later added, “Historically this group has grown more than 10 percent a year so we expect that to continue over the next five, 10 years ... and so this space will hold us till about 2018.”

He said a lot of the laboratory personnel at Alcami hold bachelor’s and advanced degrees in chemistry.

In the company’s existing main building off 23rd Street, employees include 220 laboratory personnel, of which about 150 are scientists.

Catalone described the work they were doing in one of the labs on the upper floors, where sodium lights were under use because they were working with light-sensitive materials.

“This laboratory has just undergone a redesign where they’ve improved laboratory workflows and they’ve created work stations and filled out all the supplies necessary to do the testing so that we can improve our efficiencies. So what they do in here primarily is the development of new methods,” Catalone said, referring to that specific space. “So whenever a product comes to us or a raw material, we have to figure out how do we test it and what do we test it against. Some of that is according to specifications that are developed by organizations like the U.S. Pharmacopeia or the European Pharmacopeia.”

In 2018, the company hopes to be finished with a new, potentially 40,500-square-foot headquarters building adjacent to its existing headquarters on Scientific Park Drive. The space in the company’s current headquarters, already used for labs, will in the future hold additional labs while the administrative functions and offices will move to the new building. Construction is expected to begin next year, Alcami officials said.

The company announced in November last year that it had decided to expand in Wilmington, planning to invest $15.8 million in additional space for labs and corporate offices. Earlier in 2015, Wilmington and New Hanover County officials voted to provide the company with $500,000 in performance-based incentives over a five-year period.

“I’m very impressed with the lab space they’ve designed, the investment they’re going to make in the new building, the amount of people they’ve hired and they’re going to hire more ... It was a good partnership between the company, the city and the county and the state that will allow them to grow here,” said Wilmington Mayor Bill Saffo after participating in a ribbon-cutting ceremony for Alcami’s new lab space. 

Kutzer said, “There are additional programs and projects in the pipeline for our location here so it is a very exciting time for us. We have seen double-digit growth over the last two years across the country. We have quadrupled our customer base; we have quadrupled our number of projects we’re dealing with and working on – so very, very exciting times.”

In addition to the new laboratory, the tour included quick looks at Alcami’s drug manufacturing facility, where tablets are pressed and capsules created, and its packaging division, where a machine can create blister packs for those tablets and capsules.

“We are a contract development and manufacturing organization. We do services for other companies ... You don’t typically see Alcami’s name on a label. We don’t own the actual brands of the pharmaceutical product, but many times those are manufactured or tested within our network,” said Kim McClintock, Alcami’s senior director and business team lead for drug product and development.

She said the company has seven sites across the globe, which in addition to Wilmington include Durham; Charleston, South Carolina; Missouri; New Jersey; Wisconsin; and Weert, The Netherlands.

As a result of the company’s growth, Alcami is hiring, McClintock said.

Some of the company’s employees have been there for decades, including Scott Jedrey, senior manager with the firm’s stability services division.

His group gets products from Alcami’s packaging division or other clients and puts them in chambers set with certain specifications, such as specific temperatures and humidities.

“What we’re doing is helping clients determine expiration dating and shelf life of products,” explained Jedrey, who has been with Alcami for 27 years. “We’ll put product in the chambers that could last anywhere from several months to several years. Periodically we’ll pull samples …  and we’ll send that product over to the lab that lab will test that product as long as that product is still testing good then we’ll keep going with the study that way at the end of that if it’s a three-year study and that product is still good then you’re expiration date can be set at 36 months.”

More people in Wilmington could be finding long-term jobs with the company soon. McClintock said June 21 that there were more than 70 positions listed on the company’s website.

“So we are in a rapid growth mode,” McClintock said.