As the war in Ukraine rages around them, employees at Kyiv-based Darnitsa, the country’s largest drugmaker, are working around the clock to produce antibiotics, painkillers, heart medications and other critical products their fellow citizens desperately need. Now they’re taking on an additional challenge: making their own version of Pfizer’s promising Covid-19 pill.
On March 18, the company signed a deal to produce Paxlovid amid the chaos of war in a country that’s already lost 110,000 lives to Covid.
“As long as we can operate, we will operate,” Dmytro Shymkiv, said Darnitsa’s executive chair. “This is our country. This is our front line, and we have to deliver.”
As the threat from Russia escalated last month, Shymkiv and other senior business leaders were summoned to the offices of President Volodymyr Zelensky for an urgent briefing. Gathered in a circle beside Zelensky and military officials in an ornate conference room in Kyiv, the executives were urged to keep the economy running in the coming days and to stay in Ukraine, close to their employees.
They’d be put to the test just hours later.
The next morning, on February 24, Shymkiv awoke to the sound of explosions. Russia’s invasion had begun, and his mind quickly turned to the crisis in front of him. The Darnitsa chair, who previously helped coordinate reform in Ukraine as deputy head of former president Petro Poroshenko’s administration, jumped on the phone with his team to map out a plan as his family packed their bags.
“During World War 2, the UK was under bombardment, and at the same time the economy continued to operate,” Shymkiv said, at one point pausing amid the sirens wailing nearby. “It needs to operate.”
When you see rockets flying all over the place and you see explosions, and you hear the sirens, you don’t have many people willing to drive a truck around.
— Darnitsa executive chair Dmytro Shymkiv
“Darnitsa is iconic, and it’s been a symbol of Ukraine for many years as a leading pharmaceutical company,” he added. “You can’t close it.”
Even in peacetime, making drugs is a complex business. Today, Darnitsa’s more than 1,000 employees face the extraordinary pressure of producing medicines while their city is under siege. The company has shipped more than 10-million units since the war began, according to Shymkiv, who led Microsoft’s Ukrainian operations until 2014.
Shymkiv declined to provide details of the company’s activities, citing security concerns, but said it relies on employees and others who’ve risked their lives to deliver medicines, in some cases to areas surrounded by Russian troops. Even one of the country’s top doctors drove himself in an ambulance to pick up medical goods, Shymkiv said.
“When you see rockets flying all over the place and you see explosions, and you hear the sirens, you don’t have many people willing to drive a truck around,” he said. “Some were ready to deliver.”
Darnitsa, founded in 1930, survived World War 2 and decades under Soviet rule, until Ukraine gained independence in 1991. Now a typical day involves fielding calls from desperate people, such as an elderly couple in Kyiv who needed treatments, Shymkiv said. Employees at Darnitsa have lost their homes or faced relentless bombing, while others have left to fight. About 150 workers are staying in a shelter where they’re schooling three dozen children during the long days.
Darnitsa is part of a network of companies and health organisations trying to keep supplies moving. The Alliance for Public Health, a non-profit that helps people with HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis, said some of its mobile units delivering humanitarian aid and treatments have been damaged or demolished.
“Sustaining the achievements that have been gained is the biggest risk,” said Andriy Klepikov, its executive director. “Fifteen years of work can be destroyed in days of war.”
The group sends out regular updates to its followers. The latest, on Wednesday, “is the most heartbreaking so far”, describing the destruction in the port city of Mariupol. The war began a month ago, he noted. “It feels much longer.”
The World Health Organisation has reported more than 70 attacks on healthcare facilities. About 7-million people have been displaced within the country, supply chains have been severely disrupted, medicines are running low and hospitals are struggling to provide care to the sick and wounded, it said.
While Darnitsa copes with the supply turmoil, it’s moving ahead with plans to manufacture the Pfizer treatment, which has emerged as an important tool two years into the pandemic. Russia’s assault delayed the signing of a licensing agreement with the UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool, but not for long.
As with other manufacturers, Darnitsa will need to secure ingredients, demonstrate the drug can maintain its properties and seek regulatory authorisation, among other hurdles. It could take more than a year to launch the product, Shymkiv said.
“It needs to start now,” he said.
On March 17, the Geneva-based patent pool said 35 companies around the globe agreed to produce Pfizer’s drug. A Ukrainian producer, later identified as Darnitsa, had applied but was unable to complete the deal because of the war. The company signed the next day.
“It was a huge surprise,” said Charles Gore, Medicines Patent Pool executive director. “We thought we’d keep it open for some months until there’s some sort of resolution in Ukraine, and when they came back to sign, I thought: ‘Oh my god.’ That’s sort of the spirit we’re seeing in Ukraine.”
Shymkiv said it’s a reflection of how they’re planning for a peaceful future. Covid will continue to pose a problem along with other deadly diseases, he said.
“The pandemic threats will still be there,” he said. “We have to look beyond today.”
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— Bloomberg
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