Pfizer’s new gene therapy facility in Durham could create more than 50 new jobs
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s presence in the Triangle is expected to grow again in the coming years, after the drug maker opened a new Durham facility for gene therapy manufacturing on Wednesday.
Pfizer has invested heavily in expanding its gene therapy capabilities over the past decade, and its new Durham facility represents a $66 million investment from the company.
Gene therapy is a new class of medical treatments that attempt to replace disease-causing genes or introduce new genes that are able to fight off diseases. Pfizer has several gene therapies going through clinical trials at the moment, including ones to treat hemophilia and Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
The new Durham facility will become the home of Pfizer’s BioTherapeutics Pharmaceutical Sciences Group, a section of the company that makes clinical supplies for Pfizer’s gene therapy treatments.
“Gene therapy represents the next wave of innovation for patients living with rare diseases, for whom there are limited treatment options currently available,” Paul Mensah, the vice president of the BioTherapeutics Pharmaceutical Sciences Group, said in a statement.
“Today represents the next step in strengthening Pfizer’s in-house gene therapy capabilities and underscores the unique ability, expertise, and resources we have to guide gene therapy through the entire development and manufacturing process and deliver this potentially life-changing technology to patients.”
The Triangle has become a hotbed for gene therapy manufacturing and gene therapy startups that have emerged from UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University.
One of those startups, Bamboo Therapeutics, led to some of Pfizer’s investment in the region in the past few years.
In 2016, Pfizer bought Bamboo Therapeutics, a Chapel Hill startup that was developing gene therapy treatments for diseases like Duchenne muscular dystrophy, in a deal that was worth up to $645 million, The News & Observer previously reported.
Bamboo itself was a subsidiary of the Research Triangle Park-based gene therapy company AskBio, which was acquired by Bayer last year in a deal worth up to $4 billion.
Many of those former Bamboo employees will now move from a Chapel Hill office to the new Durham facility, which is at 1219 Shiloh Glenn Dr.
Around 40 Pfizer employees will make the move from Chapel Hill to Durham, Pfizer said.
The company also has plans to hire more than 50 new people in the coming years.
The investment in Durham comes on top of one that Pfizer made in Sanford two years ago.
Pfizer said in 2019 that it would invest $500 million in its Sanford plant, about 40 miles south of Raleigh-Durham International Airport, to support gene therapy manufacturing, The N&O reported at the time.
That investment stands to push the company’s headcount in Lee County close to 1,000 employees.
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate.
This story was originally published December 15, 2021 at 1:47 PM with the headline "Pfizer’s new gene therapy facility in Durham could create more than 50 new jobs."
