Selkirk Pharma Inc., a Spokane-based contract pharmaceutical company specializing in injectable drugs, is now led by Colleen Dixon, its chief executive officer. Dixon succeeds Patrick Haffey, the company’s founder, chairman, and CEO. 

Dixon, 61, formerly served as vice president of program management for Selkirk Pharma. With over 30 years of experience in the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industry, Dixon has held leadership roles with Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Company, and the Bloomington, Indiana facility for Baxter Pharmaceutical Solutions LLC. Her post before coming to Spokane was with the biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, in Maryland, where Dixon was the head of biopharmaceutical project management and was charged with leading the Warp Speed project for the development of the COVID-19 vaccine, among other projects.

A native of Indiana, Dixon holds a bachelor’s in molecular genetics and psychology from Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, and a graduate degree in project management from the George Washington University School of Business, in Washington, D.C.

Selkirk Pharma was founded in 2018 and is located on a 27-acre campus just north of the Spokane International Airport, at 9110 Granite. The first of three manufacturing plants envisioned on the campus was completed in 2022. The 147,000-square-foot facility has a capacity for three manufacturing lines, with one already completed. The company intends to erect two more pharmaceutical buildings and an administration building in the future and employ up to 250 people. Currently, the company employs about 73 people. 

The Journal recently met with Dixon to catch up on the company’s plans, its obstacles, and what she hopes to accomplish in her new role. 

What has Selkirk Pharma been up to these last couple of years? 

I started at Selkirk shortly after our main building was completed in late 2022. We all moved in and got things in place. I know that a lot of people think, “Great, you can start manufacturing.” That’s not the way it works in our industry. For the next 14 months, we validated all of our equipment. All of our systems have to be ready for good manufacturing practices. That’s a super complicated process in the pharmaceutical industry. There are a lot of strict requirements about how you have to go about proving that your equipment operates the way you say it does.  

Then we’ve had this major change from the build process to now we’re starting to operate and bring in clients. We’re focused much more on sales and much less on design and build. We have our first client, and we are in our tech transfer process. And of course, we are working on other clients and moving our sales pipeline forward. 

How would you describe Selkirk Pharma’s focus as an injectable manufacturer?  

We’re starting out mostly focused on clinical and very small-scale commercial manufacturing. Our equipment is designed for high-value products, where if you lose some of that product in the manufacturing process—every manufacturing process has some loss—it’s very expensive. So we picked equipment that would save every last drop of the product so we could target higher-end, expensive products.

You can think of us as a boutique manufacturer. Our filler runs at a rate of 3,600 units per hour and large commercial fillers run at about 36,000 or 70,000 units per hour. We’re 10 to 20 times smaller than the biggest commercial fillers. We are expecting to produce about 4 million units per year. 

Why did the former CEO leave the company? 

The former CEO was the founder, and like a lot of companies, when you’ve gotten through the exciting phase of building the company and started into operation, there is usually a pretty significant transition. That’s what happened here. Patrick is still in Spokane, and he is still our founder, but he’ll go on to do the next great thing, I imagine. He’s still a huge supporter of Selkirk Pharma. 

What drew you to pursue a career in the pharmaceutical industry?

I think I always wanted to be a scientist. As a kid, that’s the stuff that excited me. I think I was just interested in experimentation.

My parents like to tell the story that my first foray into chemistry was blowing up my little Easy Bake Oven when I was young. So baking wasn’t sufficient for me. Chemicals are a way better way to go. I loved that, and I loved the biological world, how things grew. So I pursued that and went to school at Carnegie Mellon, then off and worked in academics where I did a lot of cool esoteric research.

At some point, I wanted to be able to apply that research and make some difference, so I went to work for Eli Lilly in Indianapolis. This is a place where scientists really aspire to work. I got a job there and started doing work with their development group and just loved it. You could see things progress; you could see molecules getting launched and patients being helped. That was really impactful work. 

As a scientist, how did you begin taking on leadership roles? 

One of the great things about Eli Lilly, at least when I was there, was they were very serious about career development. They were building a new program where they were taking scientists out of the lab and making them into project managers.

What they found is when they just brought in people who were professional project managers but not scientists, and they had to work with scientists, it didn’t work because they didn’t understand the context of how scientists think. So they decided to go the other way and teach scientists management skills who could then work with scientists on drug development projects.

That’s exactly what I did. I went through a training program and joined the project management department and realized I really liked people more than I liked science. Spending all day with people was amazing, and I was still driving drug development projects and making a difference, just in a different way.

What do you hope to accomplish in your new role?

The big thing for us is growth. I think the original vision for Selkirk was to build an employer that would have an impact on Spokane while helping to supply drugs to patients, so what we do is important. We have a good core of people who have been here since the start, and to make a difference, we have to be able to grow.

It’s great that we have one line operating, and we love that we employ some 70 people, but it’s a lot more exciting to think about employing 200 people. So I’m really focused on that long-term vision of how we get there while being successful. I’m thinking about the partnerships that we need, how to work with the local universities, and how to partner with other businesses. There’s a great opportunity, but now we have to go out and build that. 

What challenges do you foresee? 

Spokane is interesting because it’s in a place that doesn’t have a lot of biotech. If you go to the Eastern seaboard, where I’m from, there’s just a line of every aspect of pharmaceutical development, and they’re close. Spokane is sort of out on its own here. So I think that’s a big challenge for us. We have to build better networks because they don’t come automatically. We have to connect to Bend, Oregon, we have to connect to Seattle, and California and really build up, not just the flow of supply but of vendor relationships and client relationships to the West Coast. 

I think the other challenge is the business of contract manufacturing organizations has changed a lot. A lot of capacity was built during the pandemic to support the vaccine. A few years ago, the capacity was very strained. It’s not strained now. We have to work harder to compete in that space.