Xellia completes $13M expansion of its Budapest facility

Xellia has completed a $13 million expansion at its facility in Budapest, Hungary, that will bolster the Danish API maker’s focus on anti-infective products.

The new 9,800-square-foot building, located next to the company’s API manufacturing plant, will house microbiology and chemical analytical labs, a product stability center and office space. The API plant currently employs about 250 people; the expansion will create about 40 new jobs, with that number expected to grow to 80 by 2019, the company said.

Xellia said the expansion is part of its global strategy to strengthen its product release and stability testing services for APIs and Finished Dosage Form that is produced at its other sites in the U.S., China and Denmark.

“As antimicrobial drug resistance continues to pose a very real international threat, our work in the production of specialty anti-infectives is more important than ever,” Carl-Åke Carlsson, Xellia’s CEO, said in a statement. “Many of the medicines that we manufacture are antibiotics of last resort, used to treat patients when all other treatments have failed.”

A little over a year ago, Xellia entered into a Modified Consent Degree with the FDA for upgrades the regulatory agency said were required to put the former ex-Boehringer Ingelheim plant in Bedford, Ohio, back online. Xellia acquired the facility in a 2015 deal with Hikma, which ended up with the facility as part of a $300 million deal in 2014 to buy Boehringer’s Bedford Laboratories generic injectables business.

Xellia has said it expects to begin manufacturing its sterile injectable, anti-infective drugs at the Bedford site by the end of this year.