Halo Pharma And Altus Formulation Announce New Formal Collaboration

MONTREAL, May 14, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Halo Pharma today announced that it has taken a minority ownership position in, and established a formal collaboration with, the drug formulation and development company Altus Formulation Inc. Altus uses proprietary technologies and approaches to solve pharmaceutical formulation and delivery problems.

Halo is focused on satisfying the pharmaceutical client's development and manufacturing needs, whether those needs are straightforward or complex. On a fee for service basis Halo will always remain committed to practical facilitation and implementation of non proprietary and client based solutions to scientific and technical challenges in the areas of pre-formulation, analytical method development, formulation, scale up, regulatory submission and commercial manufacturing. These approaches typically generate significant new wholly client owned IP.

With this new investment in, and association with, Altus Formulations, Halo takes a first step in offering to clients, when needed, an entire suite of proprietary scientific and technical solutions designed to solve intractable issues in such areas as drug solubility, bioavailability, tamper and abuse deterrence, and precisely managed drug dosage delivery. These proprietary solutions cover a wide range of non-sterile and sterile dosage forms. One such area requiring solution is the currently much discussed question of the need for abuse resistance for narcotic analgesic and other frequently abused CNS drugs.

In commenting on the collaboration with Altus the CEO of Halo Pharma Clive Bennett said, "We are delighted to have this new association with Altus as it will allow Halo to provide novel proprietary solutions to clients with difficult formulation problems in addition to those already available public domain and client originated solutions that we have historically offered."

Damon Smith CEO of Altus Formulation remarked, "The Altus team is extremely excited to be collaborating with Halo Pharma with their track record of excellence in the contract development and manufacturing fields. By combining our strengths Altus and Halo offer a full range of development and delivery options that are ideally placed to meet the needs of the industry."

About Halo Pharma
Halo Pharma is a privately held company with operations in the New Jersey pharmaceutical corridor and in Montreal, Quebec. Halo is a significant provider of drug development and commercial manufacturing services to the pharmaceutical industry. The company provides the highest quality products and services to some of the world's leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

The development services of Halo cover the entire development cycle from preclinical to clinical trial materials to registration including project management, pre-formulation, formulation, analytical development, clinical manufacturing, scale-up and validation at commercial scale. Commercial manufacturing covers post approval launch of new and established molecular entities through late product life cycle strategies.

A wide range of dosage forms is supported both in development and commercial manufacturing.

About Altus
Altus Formulation is a Quebec based drug formulation and development company using its proprietary and patent protected drug delivery technologies to generate novel, differentiated and cost effective new products for its clients. With a focus on an improved patient experience Altus technologies include Intellitab tamper and abuse resistant technologies, Contramid®, for high dosage product delivery, MicroSpheres Plus for taste-masked controlled release liquids and the PNDS micellar technology platform that enables delivery of insoluble small and large molecules via both oral and parenteral routes to achieve increased bioavailability and low volume intravenous administration.

Contramid is a registered trademark of Paladin Labs Inc. (TSX: PLB) Each of these technologies are under exclusive global license from Paladin. Halo and Paladin are both minority shareholders in Altus Formulation.

This release contains forward-looking statements, which express the current beliefs and expectations of management. Such statements are based on management's current beliefs and expectations and involve a number of known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause our future results, performance or achievements to differ significantly from the results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.

SOURCE Halo Pharma