The €8m ($10m) facility, which was built in collaboration with Serbian partner Ivancic i Sinovi, will produce pharmaceutical tablets and solid dosage forms for local and regional markets. Sopharma said the new site will employ around 120 people.
Sopharma started work on the plant last year as part of a wider manufacturing capacity expansion that also saw it begin building a second oral solid dose production site in Sophia, Bulgaria.
The Sophia plant will employ around 420 manufacturing staff and be the drugmaker’s fourteenth production facility when fully operational in summer 2012.
Smoking cessation
Sopharma’s investment in manufacturing capacity is unlikely to have escaped the attention of Big Pharma firms given that one of its key products, Tabex (cytisine), is a potential threat to established smoking cessation treatments.
Data from a small-scale study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) suggested that Tabex is more effective than placebo at helping patients stop smoking.
The authors also said that: “The lower price of cytisine as compared with that of other pharmacotherapies for smoking cessation may make it an affordable treatment to advance smoking cessation globally.”
Pfizer’s smoking cessation drug Champix, whose active ingredient varenicline is a modified form of cytosine, may be impacted if Tabex gains wider regulatory approval. Sopharama charges as little as $1.50 for a course of treatment, whereas Champix costs around $300m.
UK drug giant GSK is also likely to be keeping an eye on developments at Sopharma given that its two smoking cessation products, Zyban and NiQuitin, are key revenue generators.