The Smithfield plant was built, with $30 million in state financing, for Alpha-Beta Technologies, but the drug company went bankrupt. Dow Chemical had big plans for it in the late 1990s, but ultimately they didn’t materialize.
Now, finally, the 55,000-square-foot facility might just live up to the great expectations that led to its construction more than a decade ago.
Last Thursday, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, which bought the plant from Dow last year for $13 million and spent more than $50 million on a comprehensive retrofit and renovation, invited Gov. Donald L. Carcieri and others to see what it’s done with the property.
The improvements include the installation of two 10,000-liter bioreactors and their associated purification suites, according to David W. Keiser, Alexion’s president and chief operating officer. The Cheshire, Conn.-based company has also purchased an additional 21 acres nearby, he said.
Alexion plans to use the facility primarily to manufacture Soliris, the first drug therapy ever approved for treatment of paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, or PNH – a rare, life-threatening blood disorder defined by chronic red blood cell destruction.
Soliris, which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved in March, is the first drug that 15-year-old Alexion has brought to market.
“It is an enormous milestone for us as a company,” Keiser said in a phone interview in advance of last Thursday’s ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Alexion will employ about 85 full-time workers at the plant, including scientists and production technicians, Keiser said. There are currently more than 100 workers at the facility, including workers finishing the renovation of the plant.
Alexion plans to shift a significant percentage of its production of Soliris to Smithfield from a contract laboratory in New Hampshire once the facility is validated and approved by the FDA. The company expects to launch Soliris in some European countries by the end of this year, and in Japan and other parts of the world thereafter, pending approvals from the European Medical Agency and regulatory authorities on other continents, Keiser said.
Alexion was founded by scientists from Yale University in 1992, and it has been traded on NASDAQ since 1996. The company has spent 15 years seeking to develop a new class of drugs from antibodies produced by the human immune system.
The company, which currently employs about 400 people in Smithfield, Cheshire and Paris, also has a number of new drugs in earlier stages of development, Keiser said.
Alexion’s decision to locate its drug manufacturing facility in Rhode Island has been hailed by economic development officials as a big win for the state, which has worked hard in recent years to develop its life sciences and pharmaceutical sectors.
“The facility was suitable for our needs, we felt there was a good pool of potential employees in the region, and it’s not terribly far from our headquarters here in Connecticut,” Keiser said.
