Oleg Kouzbit, Online News Managing Editor

In this year’s first major pharma effort Moscow’s Epidbiomed and Rusnano are developing a $127m next gen drug project outside Kirov. An ingenious combination of bio- and nanotechnology, in five years this program is expected to generate $315+m sales and start reining in current imports into Russia’s growing $3.9bn solid dosage form, vaccine and organogel market.

This Christmas and New Year holiday season is nearly over but Russia’s pharmaceutical sector is already eyeing a major nanotech investment. Within a few years a Moscow-based group of pharmas, Epidbiomed, has plans to launch a new site in the Kirov region about 700 miles north-east of Moscow and start making next gen pharmaceutical compositions with porous silicon and other materials as nano-dimensional carriers.

Timeframes and production capacities for this ambitious $127m project have yet to be specified. Rusnano, the main co-investor in a consortium kicking in $40m, has only estimated that by 2017 the new program will generate more than $315m sales.

The Russian nanotech giant and Epidbiomed are said to have set up a special company, Nanolek, to advance the endeavor.

The project partners want to establish both full-cycle production and R&D capabilities in the Kirov region. The main goal is to develop innovative technologies and new drugs to predominantly cover the Russian market that Rusnano believes is already worth an estimated $3.9bn.

As domestic consumption is expected to further grow a robust 10% a year the investor consortium hopes the new effort will help reduce or even discontinue massive imports of a range of socially significant drugs.

The investors

Set up in 1991, Moscow’s Epidbiomed, the project owner, has evolved over the years into a group of innovative R&D and production companies focusing on biotech, medical equipment and nanotech-based biomed projects. It has also established international presence operating in the CIS countries, India, and the United States.

One of Epidbiomed’s most recent developments is revolutionary electrical impedance mammography technology.

The main co-investor in the new Kirov effort, government-owned Rusnano, has supported more than 130 nanoprojects with a total worth of $17.5bn over the past four years, Rusnano’s official website says.

Nano-based medicines in a variety of forms

The Kirov regional project reportedly aims at three categories of pharmaceutical compositions including solid dosage forms, vaccines, and organogels.

In the prospective solid dosage forms, cutting-edge nanotechnology is used. A drug’s active agent is believed to assume improved durable-action therapeutic properties as it is innovatively sorbed on porous silicon’s nano-particles.

According to the project developers, these nano-particles provide “an ideal carrier” for the agent that purportedly deposits from pores as small as 10 nanometers in size. The advanced carrier is also biodegradable, non-toxic, and displays “optimal desorption speed.”

The solid dosage forms to be developed outside Kirov will include drugs for cardiovascular diseases and cancer, as well as antiviral compositions.

Vaccine production will also reportedly utilize nanotechnology. The new vaccines, including those for most deadly flu strains, will be modified with an immunologic adjuvant based on aluminum oxide nano-particles. Epidbiomed and Rusnano say the latter is expected to increase efficiency by boosting the human body’s immune response while lowering allergenic stress.

Ointments and gels to be manufactured at the prospective site will be lecithin organogel based, the developers claim.

Nanostructured lecithin is said to be able to accelerate transdermal delivery of drugs and carry higher concentrations of bioactive substances compared to liposome while outstripping the latter in stability.

The sophisticated organogels will serve to prevent thromboses and inflammatory conditions, the project owner says.