Alnylam's New Norton Plant Seen as Strengthening State's Pharma Hub
Friday, February 19, 2016
A new manufacturing plant south of Boston for one of the state’s fastest-growing drug companies represents a lot more than simply one company’s expansion, according to the head of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center. It’s about moving beyond the state’s traditional role as a hub of research into a region that can own all aspects of the pharmaceutical industry.
“The way I see this is, we want to present Massachusetts as a closed pharmaceutical system,” said Travis McCready, president and CEO of the MLSC, about plans by Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: ALNY) to build a 130,000 square foot facility in Norton. “This is proof that we can have the whole life cycle, from development to manufacturing to sales and marketing.”
Plans for Cambridge-based Alnylam’s newest site have been in the works for the past few months. It’s where the company plans to recruit 150 “full-time, well-paying jobs across skill levels,” plus up to 70 more in the years ahead. The company signed the purchase and sale agreement for the 12-acre site last week. The company is getting a $7 million tax break from the town of Norton over the course of 10 years, and further tax breaks from the state for cretaing jobs there.
The goal of bringing more drug manufacturing to the state was espoused by McCready’s predecessor, Susan Windham-Bannister, at least year ago as a way of creating life science jobs that don’t require advanced degrees. McCready says the jobs do require “a much more advanced manufacturing skill set” in an area with a strong history in manufacturing.
It’s also notable that Alnylam’s plant will make drugs that differ from any now on the market. Alnylam’s so-called RNA interference drugs are designed to silence disease-causing genes by blocking the process by which those genes create proteins. The company has recently come closer than any other company in the world to bringing such drugs to market, with plans to file for approval of its first drug in late 2017, and seven more in human testing.
The first-of-its-kind manufacturing site happens to be about 20 miles north of another first-of-its-kind drug manufacturing site in Fall River, the MassBiologics site to make the adeno-associated virus used in gene therapy. McCready says expanding the state's life sciences economy outside of Boston and Cambridge is another priority of the MLSC.
“I’ll take it south of Boston, I’ll take it in Worcester, I’ll take it in Framingham,” he said. “There are great sites all over Massachusetts for building new sites or repurposing existing infrastructure.”
Source : bizjournals.com
