April 14, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
AUSTIN, Texas – Pharma giant Merck Sharp & Dohme is one step closer to establishing an IT hub that could employ up to 600 people in Austin.
On Thursday, a split Austin City Council voted 7-3 to approve an incentives package worth up to $856,000 to spur the site, which would include a provision of $200 per year for 10 years for each full-time position Merck creates and retains, the Statesman reported this morning. This is the first incentives package the council has approved in three years, according to reports. Part of the city incentives would include Merck investing nearly $23 million into capital improvements, city documents show, as reported by the Statesman. Merck has proposed investing $20,532,000 in construction, approximately $2 million annually in local services, and about $500,000 in annual local purchases. The jobs created at the Merck site would have an average salary of about $84,586.
The Merck site would be among the first of the Dell Medical School’s creation of an Innovation District that would see companies working alongside academic researchers to advance health care, the Austin Business Journal said. Merck appears to be the first piece of that proposal.
As BioSpace previously reported, citing city documents, the Merck IT site would be focused on digital health and other information technology solutions.” In a previous report, Merck said the data center would focus on data collection and developing technology platforms for “personalized, proactive and preventative health care.”
Merck has been in the process of setting up a number of information technology sites across the globe to support operations. The Austin site would be the fourth location, the Journal said. The three other sites are in New Jersey, Singapore and the Czech Republic.
As the Austin project moves forward, the Statesman said Merck could set up a temporary facility in Austin and begin operations with up to 119 employees by the end of the year. A final location for the project has not yet been selected, but there are numerous places across the city that could accommodate Merck’s needs. The Statesman said it could use temporary locations at the medical school, with a final location being in the Innovation District. By 2020, Merck expects a payroll of 341 full-time jobs and a $20.2 million investment in long-term office space that would eventually be about 90,000 square feet, BioSpace previously reported.
Clay Johnson, dean of the Dell Medical School, said in a statement earlier this month that there have already been discussions about projects with Merck “to improve health, reduce inequities, improve patient outcomes and lower community health costs—potentially ranging from an effort to eradicate human papillomavirus (HPV) and cervical cancer in Austin, to pilot projects around better uses of health data, to community-based programs that increase the pipeline from schools into the health professions.”
