As part of its strategic expansion plans focused on servicing existing and growing market demands for its range of vaccines, city-based bio-pharmaceuticals company Shantha Biotechnics Limited is setting up a new vaccine manufacturing complex near Hyderabad.
“The complex will initially entail an investment of Rs 50 crore with future investments going up to Rs 100 crore. The complex will address the capacity constraints of our existing facilities to manufacture a range of enteric (relating to intestine) vaccines and the new generation pneumococcal vaccines, which are under development,” Varaparasad Reddy, managing director of Shantha Biotechnics, said here on Sunday.
Being set up on 40 acre in the Genome Valley Biotech Park at Muppireddypally village in Ranga Reddy district, the new complex will have a capacity to manufacture over 100 million doses of vaccines per year. The first vaccines to be manufactured in the facility will be from the enteric portfolio like cholera and rotavirus, he added.
“We are currently focusing our R&D efforts in the development of novel vaccines like human papillomavirus (HPV) and novel therapeutic anti-bodies,” Reddy said, adding that the company had obtained the WHO-Geneva pre-qualification for its pentavalent vaccines in the current year and had started supplying them to Unicef.
The new vaccine complex of Shantha Bio is part of the Andhra Pradesh government’s efforts to make Hyderabad the largest biotechnology hub in the world. As of now, there are over 100 biotech and pharmaceutical companies that are operational in phase-I and phase-II of the Genome Valley. The state government has earmarked about 600 acres for phase-III.
Globion Global Biotech Solutions was the first unit to begin operations at Karakapatla near here in phase-III, which was inaugurated recently. Hyderabad-based Indian Immunologicals Limited, a subsidiary of the National Dairy Development Board, will be the second unit in phase-III. IML has already been allotted 50 acre by the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Corporation and the company will invest Rs 100 crore in the project.
