Booming Regeneron to Add 300 New Jobs in New York Following $150 Million Expansion
November 13, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
TARRYTOWN, N.Y. – Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is planning a $150 million investment in its Tarrytown, N.Y. plant to expand its research and development capacities. The move will result in the creation of 300 new jobs, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Thursday.
The $150 million investment will include the construction of a 192,000 square-foot building that includes laboratory and office space, as well as a parking garage with up to 400 parking spaces. The planned construction is on top of two buildings the company recently added to its upstate New York campus at a cost of about $150 million. The two new buildings added more than 300,000 square-feet of office and laboratory space and allowed the company to hire 500 new employees, according to information provided by Cuomo’s office. Regeneron now operates more than one million square feet at its Tarrytown site, the Examiner reported.
Regeneron has hired 1,200 employees worldwide in 2015, 945 for positions in its New York sites. Overall, the company now employs more than 4,000 people around the globe – up from 682 in 2007—the majority of whom, 3,150, are in New York.
In a statement, Leonard Schleifer, chief executive officer of Regeneron, said Tarrytown has been the home of Regeneron since 1998 and the work done at the labs have resulted in "four approved treatments and an important pipeline of potential medicines for people with a range of serious diseases.”
"We look forward to continued growth and expansion in New York as we continue our work to bring innovative new therapies to patients in need,” Schleifer said.
Regeneron is coming off a strong summer after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Praluent, the PSCK9 inhibitor co-developed with Sanofi . Regeneron’s vision-loss drug Eylea was also recently approved for the treatment of visual impairment due to myopic choroidal neovascularization in Europe.
"Our commercial business continues to advance with increased demand for Eylea, our marketed medicine for serious retinal diseases, and continued launch progress with Praluent, our new therapy for hypercholesterolemia," Schleifer said when the company announced third quarter financial results. "Regeneron also continues to progress the next wave of candidates from our strong pipeline, including sarilumab for rheumatoid arthritis, the BLA for which was recently submitted to the U.S. FDA, and dupilumab, which is in Phase III trials for atopic dermatitis and asthma."
The campus expansion is being supported by a $5 million investment from Empire State Development, which is on top of $10.2 million the development group provided to help support the earlier expansions.
In April, Schleifer accompanied Cuomo as part of New York State’s first trade delegation to Cuba. Schleifer has teamed with Cuomo before on economic development issues as co-chairman of the Mid-Hudson Regional Economic Development Council, one of several groups created by Cuomo in 2011 to encourage economic growth, Bloomberg reported.
In addition to the Regeneron expansion, Cuomo announced the state is supporting the expansion of the bioscience industry through a multi-year venture capital competition. This competition will focus on selecting the most promising startups and assisting them in commercializing technologies developed within New York State universities and research labs. Annual prizes totaling $1 million will be awarded to promising bioscience companies following each round of competition, the governor’s office said. The competition will be managed by New York Ventures, the state's newly formed venture investment hub.