Actualidad

The company based in Touro, in A Coruña, has gone from being a spin-off to leading the European market in chemical synthesis. It helps to develop drugs and cancer treatments.

Outside Galicia, the town of Touro, in the heart of rural A Coruña, is perhaps little known to the general public. But the main pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms in the country, as well as important international companies and research centres, know where it is located thanks to GalChimia, a company with entirely Galician capital that nourishes them with its R+D.

The drug discovery process is a long one, “about 14 years on average”, says co-founder and CEO Carme Pampín. More than 10,000 molecules may need to be evaluated until an effective and safe drug is obtained, with an associated cost of millions of euros. GalChimia is mainly involved in these early stages of development, when it is necessary to prepare entire families of compounds to study their biological properties and achieve the desired therapeutic effect.

“We apply our expertise in organic chemistry to synthesise highly complex molecules with the potential to generate intellectual property for our customers. These are chemical compounds that do not exist yet, and our chemists have to think, develop and test different ways to get there in the shortest possible time,” Pampín explains.

GalChimia contributes on average 1,500 new chemical entities (NCEs) a year to various discovery programmes, of which only a few (less than 0.01%) will become clinical trial candidates. Still,” the CEO says, “we can say that we have been actively involved in the development of a dozen candidates that have reached clinical phases,” although confidentiality agreements do not allow her to elaborate further.

Sustainable growth

The company’s own discovery programmes, such as the development of a drug candidate for colon cancer, are noteworthy. Through grants from the Xunta de Galicia, the company carried out three consecutive projects (Oncogalfarma in 2014, Neogalfarm in 2016 and Io4colon in 2018), covering all the discovery phases in a colon cancer programme.

Founded in 2001, the Galician biotech company went in a few years from being a spin-off of the University of Santiago (USC) to leading the European market in chemical synthesis, with a business focused on R&D that offers specialised and high value-added services in synthetic organic chemistry. After almost two decades in the old laboratories of the Rio Tinto mine in O Pino (A Coruña), in 2020 it moved to its own newly created facilities in the Touro Business Park.

In 23 years, GalChimia has grown in a sustainable way, incorporating new products and services, increasing its production capacity with more work centres and with the increase of the workforce, which now reaches 50 people (with more than 50% female staff), betting on innovation and internationalisation. Since its incorporation, it has worked on more than 2,700 medicinal chemistry projects, customised synthesis and process development for more than 330 clients in more than 35 countries. Currently, its turnover exceeds three million euros and in the last decade investment in R&D&I has remained between 10% and 20% of turnover.

It signed its first long-term contract with an international client in 2010 and two years later launched an internationalisation plan based on the diversification of geographical markets, products and sectors. At the same time, the company grew, increasing its workforce and facilities with a centre in Barcelona in 2018.

One measurable result is that, while it took almost a decade to go from 100 to 200 clients, the 300th client was surpassed in just two years, something possible thanks to its presence in the international market. Today, sales abroad exceed 75%, with the European market being where they are most consolidated (Netherlands, France, Switzerland and Germany). Although a third of its customers are national, the bulk of its turnover comes from abroad.

GalChimia implements a very intensive R&D strategy: it has participated in more than 16 national and international collaborative projects.It is currently involved in two European projects (Nucapcure and ECM-CART) for the development of new treatments for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most common brain cancer in adults. This type of cancer is very difficult to access and incurable by current standards of care, so there is a great need for new alternative therapies. “In the Nucapcure project, we are working to develop proton and neutron therapies with high specificity against cancer by hijacking intracellular biosynthetic pathways.”

Interdisciplinary work

It is a highly interdisciplinary project, with experts in proton and neutron physics, synthetic chemistry, photochemistry, photobiology, radiobiology, nuclear reactor and particle accelerator technology, medical physics and radiation oncology to lay the foundations for new targeted and curative therapies against currently fatal cancer indications such as GBM. It started in February 2024 and will span four and a half years. “We have six million in funding from the European Innovation Council through the Pathfinder Open call, one of the most competitive at European level,” he says.