Dive Brief:
- Lek Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Swiss pharma giant Novartis’ Sandoz unit, is expanding production of its broad-spectrum antibiotic at a site in Slovenia, the company said Jan. 27.
- The investment will significantly increase existing capacity at the Prevalje Penicillin site, and the expansion effort will continue over several years on land adjacent to the production facility that was purchased in 2016, the company said.
- If the investment proceeds as planned, the first production lines at the site will be started up in 2019, followed by the gradual phase-in of new lines by 2023.
Dive Insight:
While Lek did not disclose the amount of Sandoz's latest investment in Slovenia, Novartis has invested more than €30 million euros into developing and modernizing facilities in Prevalje over the past decade.
"Our products are used for treating patients in 60 markets,” said Zlatko Ajd, head of penicillin products production at Prevalje. “In recent years, the demand has been continuously growing and in order to meet this demand, we have recently introduced a number of process improvements. We are pleased that Novartis has decided to invest, as the expansion of the current capacity will facilitate further development of the site and employment."
Apart from the Prevalje expansion, Sandoz has been growing its footprint. In June 2016, the generics unit said it would invest more than $1 billion between 2010 and 2020 in bio-manufacturing facilities in Austria — part of an effort to support plans to launch five biosimilars by 2020.
And at the broader group level, Novartis has also been busy streamlining its R&D structure for its pharmaceuticals division, announcing last October that it was shutting down its biologics groups in Shanghai and Schlieren, Switzerland. Going forward, biotherapeutic research and drug discovery work will be centered more out of sites in Cambridge, MA and Basel, Switzerland.