Panacea Biotech is investing about Rs 25 crore at Vashi in Navi Mumbai to develop a Global Research & Development Centre (GRAND) for the development of advanced drug delivery research based products and another Rs 20 crore at Mohali in Punjab for a New Drug Discovery Research centre to develop New Chemical Entities.

Talking to Pharmabiz, Sumit Jain, director, Panacea Biotech said, "The building is ready at the Navi Mumbai facility and the two centres are likely to be operational by the end of this year. Recently, Panacea inaugurated another Biopharmaceutical Research Centre in New Delhi, focusing on novel vaccines, peptides & monoclonal antibodies. The three new R&D centres are part of Pnacea's strategy to develop a pentagon of five R&D centres with over 500 scientists to focus on specialised areas of therapeutic research. Panacea Biotec already has 200 scientists working in two state-of-the-art R&D centres in New Delhi and Lalru, Punjab. About Rs 100 crore has been invested in setting up the R&D infrastructure and Panacea has spent about 6.1% of its turnover for R&D in 2005, he said.

He said the recently commissioned Pharmaceutical formulation plant at Baddi with an investment of Rs 45 crore has an installed capacity of 900 million tablets, 120 million capsules and 12 million semi-solids/ointment tubes per annum. The company is also planning to commission another Vaccine formulation plant at Baddi in compliance with global standards including US FDA and UK MHRA, SA MCC and WHO cGMP by the end of 2006-07. The vaccine formulation plant at Baddi will have the capacity to produce 300 million doss of Liquid vaccines and 45 million doses of Lyophilized vaccine doses per annum, he explained.

Rajesh Jain, joint managing director, Panacea said the company is in the process of developing an Anthrax vaccine, and has entered into arrangement with National Institute of Immunology (NII), New Delhi for licensing of technology and processes for the production of tissue culture-derived, formalin-inactivated Japanese Encephalitis Candidate Vaccine. The company is also working on a Dengue fever vaccine and hopes to commercialise these vaccines within three years. Panacea Biotec recently entered into an in-licensing arrangement with National Institute of Health, USA for the use of peptide based product for generation of hair follicles and hair growth. The commercialization of the product will benefit those individuals afflicted with alopecia (baldness) including androgenetic alopecia, he said at a press meet in Mumbai to announce the JV with NVI Netherlands to manufacture inactivated polio vaccines.