PHARMACEUTICAL / BIOTECHNOLOGY
UPDATE
April 2007
McIlvaine Company
Sigma-Aldrich Unit Completes Two St. Louis Expansion Projects
SAFC said that it has completed construction of two major protein active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) projects at its St. Louis manufacturing campus.
SAFC, a custom chemical manufacturer and part of Sigma-Aldrich Group, said it planned to expand its cGMP protein purification capacity.
A new biologics manufacturing facility consists of a 25,000-square-foot cGMP purification and manufacturing suite for transgenic plant and other non-animal-derived protein APIs. The facility also houses a 6,000-square-foot area for purification of animal-derived protein APIs. Validation for commercial operation of this $16 million expansion at the 400,000-square-foot campus is expected by midyear, according to a release.
St. Louis-based Sigma-Aldrich Corp. (Nasdaq: SIAL) produces biochemical and organic chemical products used in research, biotechnology, pharmaceutical development and chemical manufacturing.
Tessy Plastics Set to Expand Facility and Production
Tessy Plastics Corp. is undergoing its sixth expansion in seven years in an effort to prepare itself for grabbing a larger share of the medical market. V.I.P. ELBRIDGE Structures, Inc. of Syracuse is the general contractor for the $16 million project. It will construct an 82,000-square-foot building, containing a clean room to be used for the Elbridge–based custom-injection molding company’s new subsidiary, Tessy Medical Products, LLC.
Roland Beck, Tessy Plastics’ president, expects ground to break June 1 at the company’s Elbridge site located at 488 Route 5 West. The subsidiary will add 100 jobs over the course of two years. Twelve will be hired when Tessy Medical Products begins production in early 2008, Beck says. The company will hire the rest as the subsidiary grows, he adds.
Tessy Plastics manufactures products for clients such as Welch Allyn, Inc., Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble’s Gillette unit, and Goulds Pumps. Tessy employs 550 at its 250,000-square-foot facility in Elbridge, 250 employees at its 50,000-square-foot plant in Lynchburg, Va., and 250 at its 65,000-square-foot facility in Shanghai, China.
Henry Beck, majority owner, founded Tessy Plastics in 1973. The elder Beck owns the company with his sons Kenneth and Roland. The company’s original plant was 12,000 square feet. By 1998, the plant expanded to 116,000 square feet.
Demand for Tessy Plastics’ high-volume manufacturing capabilities drove the company’s expansions.
The west plant, Tessy’s 40,000-square-foot advanced-manufacturing facility (AMF), was built in 2000 to produce parts for Xerox’s ink-jet printer cartridges. In 2003, Tessy added 60,000 square feet to the AMF to produce parts for Gillette’s deodorant. The AMF was expanded once again in 2004 with a 30,000-square-foot addition to accommodate automated assembly and testing equipment. In late 2006, Tessy built a 42,000-square-foot warehouse space to keep up with additional production demand.
Tessy Medical Products will focus on manufacturing products used in minimally invasive surgery such as canulas used to slide a camera inside a patient and cartridges that hold staples used to stitch a patient up after surgery. Medical sales account for 40 percent of Tessy’s total sales, Roland Beck says.
Tessy Plastics has been shifting away from automobile molding and pursuing medical-product molding instead, Beck says. “It happens to be something we targeted as a key market,” he says.
The building’s construction will cost $10 million. Equipment will cost $6 million.
The building will contain a clean room — a contaminant-free room — to manufacture medical products. Clean rooms ensure that everything inside the room, including the people and the medical products, remains sanitary, Beck says.
Essentially, clean rooms are a building within a building to maintain air quality, says Kim Cirman, senior project manager at V.I.P. Structures. The architecture, construction, and development company, based at 1 Webster’s Landing in Syracuse, has constructed clean rooms in the past, including one for Syracuse–based Clestra Cleanroom, Inc. in the 90s. Floratech Industries, Inc. acquired Clestra in 1999.
The project’s funding will come from a variety of sources.
Empire State Development has provided a $500,000 grant contingent upon the creation of 100 jobs in Elbridge by 2011. The money will be dispersed in three stages — when construction is completed, when Tessy hires some employees, and when the company hires the remaining workers, Beck explains.
He is also pursuing bank loans and assistance from the Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency to fund the rest of the project. Beck has yet to secure either.
M.D. Anderson, Health Science Center Break Ground on Research Facility
The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston are collaborating on a new imaging research facility.
The organizations broke ground at The University of Texas Research Park on what will become the Center for Advanced Biomedical Imaging Research, dedicated to developing technologies that will detect heart disease, cancer and other illnesses at their earliest stages.
The facility, scheduled for completion in late 2009, is being built in cooperation with GE Healthcare and the Texas Enterprise Fund.
The Center for Advanced Biomedical Imaging Research is the fourth building to be constructed, and one of six centers that will comprise M.D. Anderson's Red and Charline McCombs Institute for the Early Detection and Treatment of Cancer. The McCombs Institute is located on the UT Research Park.
The six-story, 315,000-square-foot building, near El Paseo and Cambridge streets in the Texas Medical Center, will accommodate research laboratories for synthetic and analytical chemistry, biochemistry, molecular and cellular biology and facilities for production of clinical-grade imaging agents such as radiopharmaceuticals, nanoparticle-based agents, gene-reporter and cellular tracers.
The building will also house UT-Houston's new Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Norfolk State Dedicates $35 Million Applied-Research Center
The air in the cluster of "clean rooms" at Norfolk State University's new research building is filtered so finely that the only thing you smell is the latex gloves visitors must wear.
The rooms are the technological centerpiece of the $35 million Marie V. McDemmond Center for Applied Research. The clean room facilities are the largest of their type at a Virginia university, Norfolk State officials said.
San Antonio Continues to Develop an Amazingly Diverse Economy
San Antonio, which anchors the southeastern corner of the famed Texas Hill Country, has experienced explosive growth in its economy lately, as major manufacturing and technology firms have chosen the metro area to locate major facilities.
Certainly, Toyota’s decision several years ago to build its $850 million Tundra assembly plant on the south side of the city made a huge statement about the region’s business climate. However, advanced manufacturing is just part of the mosaic that is San Antonio’s economy. With several major universities and a population of roughly 2 million, though, San Antonio has an amazingly diverse economy.
A major part of that diversity is in the life sciences sector.
Genzyme Oncology, one of the world’s leading biotechnology companies, recently announced a $1.9 million renovation of its San Antonio facilities at the Texas Research Park in western Bexar County. Genzyme’s expansion and enhancement plan creates four construction projects, bringing its total lease space to 21,000 square feet.
The company, which has grown to more than 8,500 employees worldwide, was founded 25 years ago.
“With finish-out completed on two projects, a third under construction and a fourth set to begin, Genzyme continues its commitment to research and drug development in San Antonio,” said Ron Tefteller, vice president and San Antonio operations manager for Genzyme Oncology.
A Preclinical Research Facility, scheduled for completion this spring, will be used to define pharmacological activity of new compounds.
“While Genzyme has a similar lab in Framingham, Mass., the capacity of the San Antonio facility will be greater and will allow us to conduct studies outside of oncology as activity levels demand,” said Steven Schmid, director of pharmacology for the company.
Meanwhile, DPT Laboratories Ltd. recently opened its new, 258,000 square foot research, development, manufacturing and distribution complex in San Antonio. Completion of the two-building campus at Brooks City-Base (formerly Brooks Air Force Base) enables DPT to retain 136 pharmaceutical and biotechnology jobs in San Antonio, with plans to expand to 250 employees by 2010. Current staffing at Brooks includes highly skilled warehousing and laboratory staff and technicians, as well as scientists representing multiple research disciplines.
“The addition of this world-renowned pharmaceutical company to Brooks City-Base is a major step in helping the BDA achieve our goal of transforming this former military base into a thriving bioscience, academic, industrial and technical campus,” said Howard Peak, chairman of the Brooks Development Authority, which is responsible for maintaining and redeveloping the 1,250-acre complex into a technology center for bioscience, academic, environmental and technical research.
Recognized globally for its semi-solid and liquid technical expertise, DPT Laboratories, a DFB company, is the industry source for semi-solid and liquid development and manufacturing services for the world’s leading pharmaceutical, biotechnology and healthcare companies.
With four cGMP facilities and more than 1 million square feet of state-of-the-art manufacturing, packaging and distribution space, DPT offers full service outsourcing solutions, including stand alone development, site transfers, turnkey production, packaging, and worldwide distribution.
On the northwest side of the metro, Kendall County is beginning to attract advanced technology, medical and light manufacturing industries to Boerne and the surrounding areas.
Within the past year, two hospitals have announced they will locate operations in Boerne with up to 300 beds in the next 10 years.
In addition, StanBio, a medical device manufacturer, is expanding and will add a number of new jobs to its facility, while Matrix, a customized document processing and mailing company, has purchased a new site and will double its operation.
According to local economic development officials, an unnamed pharmaceutical company will move its corporate headquarters to Kendall County from the northeast U.S., creating about 300 jobs within five years.
The company has purchased land, hired a contractor and will be breaking ground this year. The company will transfer about five corporate executives from its current location and hire the remainder of employees locally.
San Antonio’s IT Sector
Microsoft Corp. announced plans to invest $550 million to build a new data center in Northwest San Antonio. The 400,000 square foot facility is just the latest entry into the metro’s growing information technology industry sector, which employs more than 12,000 people in San Antonio.
According to city economic development officials, the annual economic impact of the IT industry is more than $3.4 billion, or 7 percent of the local economy.
A Lowe’s data center is also currently under construction in Northwest San Antonio.
Microsoft’s use of electricity from CPS Energy is also expected to generate more than $1.4 million annually in revenue to the city. An exception was granted in the city of Westover Hills’s tax phase-in guidelines because of Microsoft’s exceptionally large investment and the projected substantial fiscal benefit to the city from utility revenues.
CGI Group Inc., a leader in information technology and business process services, opened a new center of excellence in San Antonio.
The new center joins CGI’s U.S. Service Desk Operations. It is a single point of contact for CGI’s clients to call for service requests, as well as for computer hardware- and software-related questions and issues. Currently, CGI maintains Centers of Excellence in Canada, the United States, Western Europe and India.
The decision to select San Antonio was based on many factors, including the available pool of skilled IT professionals, the possibility of partnerships with local universities, proximity to existing clients and the presence of global leading businesses.
The San Antonio center will complement the other established CGI delivery centers located in Texas.
Abbott Opens New Bio Facility in Puerto Rico
Abbott has officially opened its new state-of-the-art biologics manufacturing facility in Puerto Rico to support the long-term supply Humira and other future biologics. The facility, Abbott Biotechnology Limited (ABL), received FDA approval in February to commercially produce Humira for the U.S. market. This new plant has significantly more production capacity than Abbott’s Bioresearch Center (ABC) in Worcester, MA, where the drug was previously manufactured.
"This new facility is a key milestone for Abbott as we move to focus our resources and future growth on biologic and potent-drug manufacturing," said Lawrence Kraus, vice president of manufacturing, global pharmaceutical operations, Abbott. "The advanced, high-quality infrastructure of ABL can meet the exceptionally challenging and stringent processes of biologic manufacturing. With this state-of-the-art facility, we can supply HUMIRA to the growing number of patients who have come to rely on this breakthrough product."
The new plant cost Abbott approximately $450 million and is the company’s largest capital investment to date. In addition to producing Humira, the 330,000-sq.-ft. facility is designed for large-scale production of future products in Abbott's pipeline that will require advanced manufacturing technologies.
University of Rochester Scores $26 Million NIH Grant for Influenza Research
A research team at the University of Rochester Medical Center was awarded $26 million to establish a research center with the goal of making future influenza pandemics less deadly.
The seven-year grant from the NIAID will create the New York Influenza Center of Excellence (NYICE), a collaboration between the University of Rochester, Cornell University, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and community partners. NYICE will be one of six centers nationally that together receive approximately $138 million in flu research funding.
Each of the six new centers will focus on basic research, surveillance studies, or both. Teams will breakdown the molecular and environmental factors that influence the transmission and evolution of the flu viruses and further study the immune system’s reaction to them. Others will seek to identify strains with pandemic potential, create new vaccine candidates, or bolster pandemic preparedness.
Along with the University of Rochester, recipients of the grants are Emory University, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, University of California at Los Angeles, and University of Minnesota at Minneapolis.
Center Warns of Need for State Funding
The future of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, LA, will be in doubt if it does not receive construction funding from the state this year, the center's executive director says.
Claude Bouchard, a French-Canadian geneticist, said he is essentially putting the future of Pennington's national competitiveness in a $25 million request to the state for a new clinical research building.
Although Pennington gets $12 million in operating funds annually from the state, it never has received state funds for construction.
"If they don't find $25 million when they have a $2 billion surplus, it's hopeless," Bouchard said. "Then the Pennington center has no chance of remaining a leading institution if it stays in the state of Louisiana."
The 20-year-old facility is a 600,000-square-foot health and nutrition research center on a 237-acre site. Over the years, Pennington has recruited about 10,000 people from the area to test nutrition products and various diets.
The center employs more than 600 doctors, scientists and staff, including 70 faculty members, and focuses on issues ranging from obesity and diabetes prevention to stem-cell and genetics research to fight cancer.
Pennington was founded through the $125 million gift to LSU from now-deceased oil magnate C.B. "Doc" Pennington to start a health and nutrition research campus. Most of the $53 million annual operating budget comes from federal grants.
Bouchard said the proposed 80,000-square-foot clinical research building is needed to attract more faculty and federal grants because Pennington has reached its capacity. Through clinical research, Pennington works directly with people and demonstrates the effectiveness of treatments, Bouchard said.
McIlvaine Company,
Northfield, IL 60093-2743
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