Expanding Patheon Begins Hiring Hundreds at Eastern North Carolina Plant
September 28, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
GREENVILLE, N.C. – Durham-based Patheon Inc. is forging ahead on its now one-year-old commitment to add nearly 500 jobs to its eastern North Carolina sterile-fill facility.
Wanda Yuhas, executive director of the Pitt County Development Commission, told the Greenville Daily Reflector the company hired five new project managers over the past few weeks in an effort to have new team leaders trained for the coming hiring bonanza. The new jobs are part of Patheon’s$159 million expansion of the plant. The project, including the hiring of the 488 new employees, is expected to be completed by 2019. The Greenville site is the largest contract manufacturing facility in North America, according to the North Carolina Biotechnology Center (NCBC). Patheon’s Greenville facility is a 1.5-million-square-foot complex, spread across 29 buildings on 640 acres, the NCBC said. The site is used to manufacture aseptic liquid fill, lyophilized products and oral dosage forms, along with related services.
In 2012, DSM added 139 jobs at its Greenville site, the NCBC said.
Patheon, a provider of commercial manufacturing outsourcing services and outsourced pharmaceutical development services, operates 20 commercial-scale production facilities around the world, employing roughly 8,000 people.
The Greenville manufacturing facility had been part of the DSM Pharmaceuticals family. In March, Patheon inked a $2.6 billion deal with the Dutch parent company of DSM to form DPx Holdings.
Expanding its eastern North Carolina operations isn’t the only thing on Patheon’s plate. The company is also inking deals to expand manufacturing and supply agreements. In August, Massachusetts-based Flexion Therapeutics struck a manufacturing deal with Patheon to develop FX006, an intra-articular sustained-release steroid for the treatment of osteoarthritis. FX006 is Flexion’s lead program. FX006 is expected to be manufactured at Patheon’s Swindon, England plant “to allow Flexion greater control of unit production and provide added scale to meet long-term product demand,” the company said in a statement.
In May, Ireland-based Perrigo Company plc acquired Patheon’s Mexican operations for $34 million. Perrigo said it acquired the Mexican operations in order to establish a toe-hold in the manufacturing of softgel products.
Patheon isn’t the only pharmaceutical-industry company expanding in eastern North Carolina. Across town, past tobacco fields and East Carolina University, Australia-based Mayne Pharma is undergoing a $65 million expansion project that will include the hiring of more than 100 new employees. In August Mayne Pharma, a contract and specialty pharmaceutical manufacturer, announced plans to expand the Greenville facility that includes a 126,000 square-foot expansion to support space for use in large-scale oral and solid-dose manufacturing. Mayne develops and manufactures branded and generic products globally. The company said the investment in the Greenville facility includes the hiring of 110 employees over the next five years. The site currently employs 350 people. The new positions will include scientists, quality assurance specialists and manufacturing operators. Positions will have an average salary of $60,000, almost double the average salary for the area.