Dive Brief:
- AstraZeneca has bought a manufacturing facility in Longmont, Colorado from Amgen, boosting its footprint in the state a little more than a year after buying an Amgen site in nearby Boulder.
- AstraZeneca will pay nearly $65 million to acquire the site, according to the Daily Camera, in a move aimed at bolstering commercial manufacturing capacity for the British pharma's biologic medicines.
- If all proceeds according to plan, AstraZeneca hopes to have the previously acquired Boulder facility up and running by 2017, creating as many as 400 jobs. Details on timeline for the Longmont facility were not immediately available.
Dive Insight:
Amgen originally put the six-building site up for sale in mid-2015 for $85 million, so AstraZeneca appears to have been able to acquire the facility at a discount. The 70-acre facility, previously dedicated to manufacturing Amgen's Epogen (epoetin alfa), includes a warehouse, a manufacturing facility and two labs.
"Integrating this site into our existing operations network will provide AstraZeneca and MedImmune, our global biologics research and development arm, with flexible biological manufacturing capacity to quickly bring new innovative treatments to patients," said Darren Dasburg, site director at AstraZeneca's Boulder Manufacturing Center.
An AstraZeneca spokeswoman said the Longmont facility would be used first "as a warehouse to support the biologics manufacturing in Boulder, Colorado."
In the short-term, hiring will be minimal, the spokeswoman said. "The growth in jobs will come as we decide how best to invest in the infrastructure needed to support our biologics pipeline."
Similar to other big pharmas, AstraZeneca is boosting its biologics manufacturing capacity globally. Last year, it also announced a $285 million investment into a biologics manufacturing facility in Sweden. This will supply clinical trial materials as soon as year-end 2018, and be fully operational by 2019.
Pfizer, Sanofi and Bristol Myers have also both recently announced new plans to expand biologics manufacturing. Pfizer, for example, began construction on a new clinical manufacturing site in Andover, Massachusetts this past summer.