Dive Brief:
- Pfizer on Tuesday broke ground on a new 295,000-square-foot R&D and process development facility near St. Louis, Missouri.
- The site, expected to be completed by mid-2019, will house an R&D team tasked with further developing Pfizer’s biologics, vaccine and gene therapy portfolio.
- Like many pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer has been rebalancing its manufacturing capabilities, downsizing some sites and opening others.
Dive Insight:
The Chesterfield, Missouri site will gather over 450 Pfizer employees already working in locations around St. Louis together under one roof. Opening of the new facility will support an additional 80 hires in the near future, Pfizer said.
The R&D team at the new facility will aim to develop new manufacturing processes and dosage forms. Pfizer hopes these efforts will lead to the development of new medicines in a range of disease areas like oncology, immunology and rare diseases.
Pfizer competed against a number of other companies for the site, according to St. Louis County executive Steve Stenger. The campus will include laboratory layouts, scientific casework and utility hook-ups, open office and collaboration spaces.
The St. Louis site is just one part of Pfizer’s U.S. R&D network, which also includes locations in La Jolla, California; Pearl River, New York; Groton, Connecticut; and Cambridge and Andover, Massachusetts.
In 2016, Pfizer expanded its presence in Andover by investing $200 million in the construction of a new clinical manufacturing facility there. The new Andover facility will eventually produce complex biologics and vaccines when it is completed in 2019. Pfizer is also laying groundwork to expand its presence at its site in Grange Castle, Ireland.
On the other hand, Pfizer laid off 151 employees last year in its Pearl River, New York facility. The move was part of a restructuring and rollback of vaccine manufacturing at the site. With the layoffs, Pfizer wrapped up its production of vaccines at the Pearl River plant, although an R&D team and a small production team for oncology remain at the site.
Pfizer has recently shifted production of its popular pneumococcal vaccine, Prevnar, to sites in Andover and Grange Castle in Clondalkin, Ireland.