Xellia Pharmaceuticals is expanding its manufacturing on a couple of fronts. The Denmark-based company, which is reworking the ex-Boehringer Ingelheim plant in Bedford, OH, has just started work on a manufacturing facility in Hungary.
The specialist in anti-infective meds says it has kicked off work on a $10 million project at a site in Budapest. It said the 3,000-square-meter (32,291-square-foot) centralized laboratory services building will house microbiology and chemical analytical laboratories as well as administrative offices. It is being built next to the company’s active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing plant there.
The project is slated to be completed by summer of 2017, and the drugmaker said it will add 80 positions in manufacturing, product testing and quality assurance at the new operation. That is on top of the 200 that already work at the site.
“The Centralized Laboratory Services building will ensure that, as our global production volumes continue to increase in response to customer demand, we have the expertise and the capacity to continue to deliver effective and quality assured anti-infective products,” CEO Carl-Åke Carlsson said in a statement.
The Hungary expansion comes as Xellia is refitting the former Ben Venue plant in the U.S. that Boehringer Ingelheim shut down at the end of 2013 after years of regulatory issues that led to a consent decree governing the facility. Xellia picked up the newer parts of the site last November.
Xellia announced several weeks ago that the FDA had agreed to modify the consent decree to make its project more manageable. When the upgrades are complete next year, Xellia has said it intends to hire 170 people to operate the nearly new sterile injectable lines Boehringer installed before abandoning the effort.
- read the release
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