A breakthrough investment in Warsaw. The “heart of every medicine” is created

Poland imports 1,400 active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), and only 656 are produced in our country. This is to change thanks to the API Production Technology Center, which was opened on Wednesday at the Łukasiewicz – Institute of Industrial Chemistry.

According to the director of the Łukasiewicz – Institute of Industrial Chemistry (IChP), Dr. Eng. Ewa Śmigiera, over 60 percent active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) used in European production comes from Asia – mainly from China and Indiai. In 2000, Europe accounted for 42%. global API production, today – for less than 10 percent. Poland imports 1,400 active substances, but only 656 are produced in our country.

– Over the course of two decades, the European pharmaceutical industry has lost the ability to independently produce what is the heart of every drug, i.e. API active substances. For years, this was treated as a natural effect of globalization. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns, quarantines, broken logistic chains, suspended deliveries, and then the war in Ukraine and new disruptions. Today, there are customs duties, export restrictions, geopolitical tensions, among others. between the United States and China – said director Śmigiera.

Hence the initiative to establish the API Manufacturing Technology Center (CeTeAPI), a research and production center for pharmaceutical active substances, which opened on Wednesday. The new institution is part of the Mościcki Campus, which will also house the Center for the Development of Low-Emission Technologies and the Center for the Development of Pharmaceutical and Related Products.

– It is no coincidence that this project is called Kampus Mościcki. The founder of our institute – later the president of the Republic of Poland – and his collaborators built laboratories because they knew that without science there would be no economic independence. Today, the context is slightly different, but the logic is the same – emphasized Dr. Eng. Śmigiera.

The president of the Łukasiewicz Center, Dr. Hubert Cichocki, stated that CeTeAPI and CeProFarm will create a “coherent ecosystem” in which active substances will be created from the first laboratory synthesis to the finished product. According to Dr. Cichocki's independence in drug production is an investment in Poland's security no less important than in armament. – Drug safety (…) is one of the key elements of broadly understood state security – he argued.

Wojciech Maszewski, director of the Department of Pharmaceutical Products at the IPD, recalled that in March 2025, the European Commission presented the Critical Medicines Act project – an act on critically important medicines, which is intended to improve the availability, supply and production of the most important medicines in the EU. The establishment of CeTeAPI is intended to be the Polish response to this regulation. Creation of CeTeAPI – including: modernization of the building and retrofitting with research equipment – cost over PLN 10 million, of which PLN 5.2 million were funds from the National Reconstruction and Immunity Program (KPO).

Łukasiewicz – Institute of Industrial Chemistry was founded in 1916 in Lviv, among others. by prof. Ignacy Mościcki as the Institute of Scientific and Technical Research – Metan. In the interwar period, the center produced industrial chemicals, in the 1960s – antibiotics, three decades later it developed its own anti-leukemia drug, and in 2000 – the first Polish insulin produced by genetic engineering. For seven years, the institute has been a member of the Łukasiewicz Research Network (SBŁ).

SBŁ is a research and development organization consisting of 22 scientific institutes that employ approx. 7,000 people. employees. The main areas of activity of SBŁ institutes are defense and security, chemicals for industry, energy transformation and circular economy. (PAP)

abu/ bar/