December 12 (SeeNews) - Slovenian pharmaceutical company Lek has started the construction of a 400 million euro ($432 million) biosimilars production plant in Lendava, the government said.
The company intends to open 300 jobs at the high-tech production centre for biosimilars, which represents one of the highest foreign direct investments in the history of Slovenia and is planned to operate at full swing at the end of 2026, the government said in a statement on Monday.
"Slovenia is an extremely attractive environment for foreign high-tech investments, among other things due to its good infrastructure. Attractive because it actually has a pretty good environment for development, we have people with knowledge that are the envy of the whole of Europe," prime minister Robert Golob said at the groundbreaking ceremony for the new plant.
The government signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Lek on the planned investment in March and supported the project with a direct incentive, the government said.
In August, Swiss pharmaceutical group Novartis transferred its ownership of the entire equity capital of Lek to generic medicines manufacturing unit Sandoz as part of the global process for the spin-off of Sandoz from Novartis.
Novartis announced the Sandoz spin-off last year. The Swiss group aims to focus on hematology, oncology, immunology, neuroscience and cardiovascular treatments, while Sandoz will retain the generics and biosimilars division.
A biosimilar is a biological medicine highly similar to another already approved biological medicine (the 'reference medicine'). Biosimilars are approved according to the same standards of pharmaceutical quality, safety and efficacy that apply to all biological medicines, according to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) which is responsible for evaluating the majority of applications to market biosimilars in the European Union.
($ = 0.927 euro)