Fidia Farmaceutici is an Italian, multi-national Company developing, manufacturing and selling products based mainly, but not only, on hyaluronic acid and its derivatives. Fidia is based in Abano Terme, Padua, a thermal area in north-eastern Italy, not far from Venice. It is a fully integrated Company managing almost every step of the product development in-house: from R&D, through regulatory and quality aspects, manufacturing of raw materials and finished dosage forms, to marketing and sales. It is among the very few companies worldwide with hyaluronic acid-based, FDA-approved products, thus confirming their high quality standards.
The business and research areas of the Company are joint healthcare, tissue repair and dermatology, aesthetic medicine, women healthcare, eye surgery and CNS. About 60 people work in the R&D facilities of Fidia Farmaceutici, directed by Cynthia Secchieri, PhD: half of them are located in the headquarters R&D building in Abano Terme (chemical, pharmaceutical, pre-clinical and clinical development) and half in the Fidia Research Sud unit in Noto, Siracusa (biotechnological processes development). Fidia produces hyaluronic acid of different origin and with different ranges of molecular weight, according to the indications designed for the diverse finished products. In addition, Fidia R&D develops patented technologies for the chemical modification and formulation of this biopolymer, aimed at obtaining derivatives with different physical (processability, solubility, residence time, viscosity) and biological (enhanced activity in different processes) properties. This activities led to the filing of more than 600 patents in the last 50 years.
The R&D projects mainly concern the field of osteoarthritis local therapy, wound care, skin treatments and biosurgery in general. The research on hyaluronic acid, the chemical modification of its structure and the formulation technologies for the raw materials obtained thereof have the objective of creating new solutions in the branch of intra-articular synovial fluid supplements and treatments (where Fidia is leader in Europe and other geographical regions), scaffolds for tissue regeneration, topical products for skin pathologies, soft tissue fillers, hydrogels for ophthalmic surgery, dermocosmetic novelties and drug delivery systems.
Furthermore other research opportunities sometimes arise in non-strategic areas of the Company, such as oncology, as in the case of the Oncofid™ platform: our teams developed a technology for the conjugation of hyaluronic acid and antitumour drugs in order to obtain a highly tolerable, potent, selective tool for the treatment of specific forms of cancer, thanks to the active CD44-mediated targeting of tumour cells. In this context the hyaluronan-paclitaxel adduct Oncofid™-P has been developed and is now in Clinical Phase II for the intravesical treatment of bladder cancer.