Xellia Pharmaceuticals Expands R&D in Croatia

Xellia Pharmaceuticals has expanded its R&D team with more than 15 new scientists and added approximately 1000 m² of new laboratory space at its Centre of Excellence in Zagreb, Croatia, the company announced on Sept. 27, 2016.

Xellia’s portfolio includes fermentation-based APIs as well as sterile finished dosage forms. Many of these anti-infectives are of last resort and therefore play a vital role in tackling resistant microbes, often when all other treatments have failed. The Zagreb innovation team is dedicated to finding solutions to antimicrobial resistance, from improving the efficacy, safety, and delivery of existing anti-infectives and reducing toxic side effects to developing novel drug–device combination antimicrobial therapies. The team is also working to support the discovery and formulation of new chemical entities effective against resistant microbes, with novel modes of action.

“While generic anti-infective APIs and FDFs [finished dosage forms] are, and will continue to be, a core backbone of Xellia’s business, our investment in the expansion of the Product and Innovation Centre of Excellence highlights our commitment to developing a more balanced portfolio of more innovative and proprietary anti-infective products,” said Xellia CEO Carl-Åke Carlsson, in the press release. “The investment is timely in the wake of the escalating scale of the antimicrobial resistance crisis, and even now we are starting to see steady progress in the form of an early-stage pipeline of novel drug products and compounds.”