Advanced materials developer Kyle Flanigan always dreamed of a job as a commander on a space station. Advanced materials developer Kyle Flanigan always dreamed of a job as a commander on a space station. The closest he came to fulfilling this aspiration was an assignment to work on a space program at Intel Corp. in Portland, Ore., to make computer chips for space shuttles. But the project folded and Flanigan’s path took a new course.
Years later, that path would cross with fellow chemist Garry Morefield and blossom into a business partnership and a yearlong development process to start US Specialty Formulations, a clean and sterile small-batch pharmaceutical manufacturing company in Bethlehem. US Specialty Formulations now is one of the few in the nation positioned to fill a newly created gap in what the men refer to as “a gray area of the pharmaceutical industry, called compounding. Our business model approaches it from an advanced materials and clean manufacturing angle, rather than a pharmacist’s angle, Flanigan said.
It’s a model that could be in the right place at the right time. Last November, President Barack Obama signed the Drug Quality and Security Act in response to pharmacies that were producing larger quantities of drugs than regulations allow, making for an unsafe and unsterile production environment.
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