Ardena, a contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) and bioanalytical contract research organization headquartered in Belgium, has installed a compaction simulator from Medelpharm, part of Korsch Group, at its drug product development site in Ghent, Belgium. The equipment is designed to help scientists predict tablet performance under commercial production conditions using only a few grams of material.

The simulator reproduces key compression parameters of production tablet presses, including speed, dwell time, pre-compression and main compression. This enables formulation scientists to evaluate active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), excipients, and blends earlier in development and to identify potential defects such as capping, lamination, and sticking before scale-up.

Using smaller quantities of material could be particularly useful for formulations involving scarce, costly or highly potent APIs. Ardena said the technology can help reduce trial batches and material consumption while supporting formulation decisions, technology transfer, and Quality by Design approaches.

The simulator’s equipment libraries include tablet presses used across Ardena’s manufacturing network, including sites in Ghent, Belgium, Pamplona, Spain, and Somerset, New Jersey. It also supports development involving multilayer tablets, tab-in-tab formats, minitablets, and dry granulation.

The investment adds to Ardena’s 2026 expansion of its North American development capabilities. In April, the company announced that its 2,500-square-foot Good Laboratory Practices bioanalytical laboratory in Somerset was operational, offering liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, immunochemistry, and controlled sample storage for preclinical and clinical studies.