Merck to close one facility, boosts another
pharmafile | July 5, 2011 | News story | Manufacturing and Production, Research and Development |Â Â Ireland, Merck & Co, pharma job cuts, pharma manufacturing newsÂ
Merck & Co continues to shake up its network of facilities, deciding to close a recently-acquired site in the USA while adding new capacity to a heavily downsized manufacturing unit in Ireland.
On the block is the headquarters of ophthalmic specialist Inspire Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by Merck in a $430 million acquisition earlier this year. The drugmaker says it intends to shut down the entire facility in Raleigh, North Carolina, with the loss of 51 jobs.
Merck bought Inspire in order to bolster its ophthalmic drugs business with three already-marketed products plus a pipeline of candidate drugs. Inspire had trimmed down its business already in order to focus on eye diseases after the failure of its candidate cystic fibrosis treatment – denufosol – towards the end of 2010.
Inspire employed around 240 employees at the outset of this year, but cut more than a quarter of its workforce in the wake of denufosol’s demise.
Meanwhile, there has been better news for employees of Merck’s Brinny plant, near Innishannon in County Cork, which was dramatically downsized in 2010 as part of a programme of facility closures and job cuts intended to save around $3.5 billion a year from 2012.
Merck said last September it would cut 160 out of 519 jobs at the former Schering-Plough facility, which focuses on the manufacturing of biologic drugs such as Intron A (recombinant alfa interferon) for treating cancer and viral diseases.
Now, Merck (which operates as MSD in Europe) has opened two new units at the site which represent a combined investment of 29 million euros.
One of the new units is a centre that will develop and provide bioassays for therapeutic protein projects within the Merck group, and will employ 10 staff.
The second is a plant for manufacturing conjugate pneumococcal vaccines for use in paediatric clinical trials, and will have the capacity to produce 100 million doses of pneumococcal conjugate vaccine a year.
The vaccines unit will employ 60 people initially for the construction, commissioning, qualification and clinical supply phases, reducing to 30 in the long term, provided the clinical trials are a success.
Phil Taylor
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