Scottish-based drug delivery company, Bio-Images Drug Delivery Limited (BDD), has positioned itself for rapid growth with a further round of investment in its GMP* manufacturing capabilities alongside strategic recruitment to the senior leadership team and the Board of Directors.
The £1.2m investment, has been led by Edinburgh-based business angel investment syndicate, Archangels, supported by Scottish Enterprise and BioCity Investments.
The funding will enable BDD to invest in senior hires and significantly expand its current GMP capabilities to support product development, manufacture of clinical trial supplies and for rapid GMP manufacture of products to support its SWIFT adaptive clinical trials service.
The new manufacturing and formulation capabilities will allow international pharma, biotech and consumer health companies, many of whom already work with BDD, to speed up the clinical evaluation of their products, resulting in a reduction in development time and costs.
Carol Thomson, CEO of BDD, said:
“This is a very exciting time for BDD. We have always been recognised for our ability to provide rapid development and clinical proof of performance for new drug products. This growth allows us to build on that, providing a single centre comprehensive service from development through in vivo testing and provision of larger scale clinical trial supplies”
To support the new growth phase, BDD has appointed Dr Stephen Brown as a non-executive director. At the same time, Joanne Kelley has stepped up from her role as non-executive Director as the newly elected Chair of the Board.
Stephen Brown, has a strong pedigree in drug delivery and pharmaceutical product development and was previously CEO of privately held Encap Drug Delivery, leading the transformation of the business and ultimately its sale to Capsugel (KKR) until it was acquired by Lonza in 2017.
Commenting on his appointment, Stephen said:
“I am very happy to be joining the excellent team at BDD. There are very few companies in the world that have such breadth and depth of formulation and drug delivery expertise across a range of dosage forms and the capability to evaluate clinically in real time under the same roof (adaptive clinical trial mode).
“Over the years BDD has proved to be a go-to partner for challenging oral drug delivery projects with a track record in bioavailability enhancement, controlled/sustained release, chronotherapy and targeted release.”