Published on Tuesday October 22, 2013

The new R&D center in St-Petersburg

A new R&D complex is built in St-Petersburg.

The new R&D complex will be located on the riverside of the Chernaya Rechka in the city center in St-Petersburg. The center will be located at 23, Krasnogvardeyskiy pereulok, St-Petersburg, Russian Federation. More than 150 people will be working at the center occupying 2500 square meters.

It is planned that several R&D companies will be based at the center.

One of the residents of the new complex is BioEq LLC. BioEq is a portfolio company of RVC Biofund.

BioEq is a clinical pharmacology unit (CPU) which has all needed equipment and facilities for the performance of bioequivalence and phase I studies in accordance with international standards.

Clinical facility includes outpatient department for patients and volunteers screening, wards, examination rooms, recreation rooms, emergency room, surgery block for minimal invasive surgeries. The capacity of the center is 40 beds, which means that it will be possible to perform several clinical trials simultaneously. BioEq is equipped with modern state of the art equipment for first in human studies (FIH).

BioEq will have a medical license and accreditation for clinical trials conduct from the Ministry of healthcare.

50 people including medical and administrative staff will work at BioEq.

This project satisfies the requirements of the pharmaceutical industry development strategy till 2020 (Pharma 2020) which stipulates local development and production of generics and innovative drugs.

Another resident of the R&D center is a contract research organization, Smooth Drug Development. SDD is a company organizing pre-clinical, clinical studies and drug registration. The company provides a full spectrum of services and a sort of one-stop shop for clinical research and product development needs of the Russian and foreign pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Smooth Drug Development provides services from drug registration strategy preparation to new drug application in Russia. The company performs phase I-IV clinical trials in Russia and CIS.

The company has grown to 70 people on staff including medical writers, study teams, data management, PVG, medical monitoring and QA departments.

Besides BioEq and Smooth Drug Development, it is planned to open other R&D companies to satisfy the concept of the new center to create an R&D center of full cycle. Negotiations with applicants are planned till the end of 2013.

The companies will share office facilities, equipment, IT, administrative and logistic infrastructure.