A growing company headquartered in Wilmington unveiled some of its new lab space during tours Tuesday of its numerous facilities off 23rd Street.

Alcami, a provider of custom development and manufacturing services for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, 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 showed off on Tuesday, which the company will start moving equipment into on Wednesday, 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.”

That’s the year 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 next door. Construction is expected to begin next year, Alcami officials said.

Formerly known as AAIPharma Services Corp./Cambridge Major Laboratories Inc., the firm revealed its new name, Alcami, in March. 

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 if the company chose to expand here.

"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 Tuesday for Alcami's new lab space. 

Speaking after tours of some areas in Alcami’s buildings, which total five including a learning day care center for children, the company’s CEO Stephan Kutzer said Wilmington is where the company’s home is, with 400 of the firm’s 1,000 total employees are based and “where we are trying to have the fastest growth within the company.”

Kutzer added, “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’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.

She said there are more than 70 active positions listed on the company's website.

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