Regeneron is supersizing a campus expansion in New York, investing $800 million and adding 1,500 jobs and winning a substantial tax break in the process.
The company will build out its second campus in Rensselaer, New York, adding manufacturing capacity, laboratory space and warehouse facilities and adding 1,500 jobs over the next seven years. The state is chipping in $140 million in incentives to help.
According to a spokeswoman, the first part of the project will include about 350,000 square feet of manufacturing space, 240,000 square feet for offices and labs and a 1,000-space parking garage. The campus is about 130 miles north of its headquarters in Tarrytown, New York.
The expansion is slated to take about seven years. This is a larger version of a previously announced expansion for the drugmaker which made its name with blockbuster eye treatment Eylea, but which has more recently added new-generation cholesterol fighter Praluent and rheumatoid arthritis drug Kevzara, both of which it shares with Sanofi.
“As our number of approved and investigational medicines continues to grow, our need for world-class manufacturing teams and facilities also increases,” CEO Leonard S. Schleifer, M.D., Ph.D., said in a statement.
The company, which will have about 7,000 workers in the state when the build-out is complete, has steadily grown there since it launched as a biotech startup in 1988. At the end of 2016, it announced it would buy its headquarters in Tarrytown so it could control its fate there. It paid $720 million for 150 acres, consisting mainly of office buildings and lab space. But the facility has room to grow, with development rights for more than 500,000 square feet of construction.
It has also rapidly built up a biologics manufacturing site in Ireland. Last year, it said it would invest another $100 million there creating 300 more jobs. The U.S. drugmaker, which now boasts the largest bulk biologics plant in a country that has attracted many large pharma, added a number of manufacturing suites to increase drug substance production capacity.
When Regeneron picked up the 400,000-square-foot former Dell computer plant in Limerick in 2013, short-term plans were to invest between $250 million and $300 million and hire 300 employees. Now it expects to have about 800 employees there by the end of the year, with a total investment of about $750 million.
By Eric Palmer
Source: Fierce Pharma
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