Drug firm Emergent to expand
Company buys site in Baltimore for R& D, testing
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Saturday, November 14, 2009
Rockville pharmaceutical firm Emergent BioSolutions announced on Friday that it has acquired a building in Baltimore where it intends to expand the development and testing of its drugs.
Emergent spent $8.2 million to acquire the 55,000 square-foot facility from the MdBio Foundation, a division of the Tech Council of Maryland that seeks to promote the state's bioscience industry.
Emergent's main revenue generator until now has been an anthrax vaccine, called BioThrax, which is the only product licensed by the Food and Drug Administration for the prevention of that disease. The company is hoping to expand its offerings soon, with products in development designed to treat tuberculosis, typhoid and hepatitis B.
Don Elsey, the company's chief financial officer, said Emergent has yet to determine which products it will develop at the facility.
As drugs reach the middle stage of testing and development, the Food and Drug Administration requires that companies do their research in a facility that has received its approval, he said. The 18-year-old facility has already received the agency's blessing. "This is a natural evolution along the line of developing our candidates," said Elsey.
John Holaday, a Washington-area biotech industry entrepreneur, said it makes sense that Emergent would seek to expand its offerings. After all, two other Maryland firms, PharmAthene and Human Genome Sciences, have their own anthrax vaccines in development.
"Those companies are well along the way in developing a vaccine and it's a competitive field," he said.
To meet demand from government customers such as the Defense Department, Emergent acquired two Frederick facilities in recent years, with the intention of expanding its local production of BioThrax. The company later decided instead to build a new facility in Michigan, which will increase its manufacturing capacity for BioThrax doses from 7 million up to 30 million per year. The company is trying to sell its Frederick facilities.
As for the Baltimore acquisition, "it was very fortuitous," said Elsey. "There aren't a ton of these facilities in the United States," he said. The company, which employs more than 600 people, expects to eventually hire up to 125 new employees to run the facility.
