December 12, 2014
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
The chief executive of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals has given an interview in which he says that the company will double its 2,500-employee workforce over the next five years.
He also said that increased competition for funding from New York state authorities for regional business development has had a “halo effect” on other regions looking to score high-profile companies, including biotech.
Leonard Schleifer, president and CEO of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc, told the Albany Business Review that a recent bidding process between 10 regions for $709 million in state funding was a good thing that increased healthy competition.
“While we’re competing, I think it’s going to have a real halo effect into the other regions,” Schleifer said of the Mid-Hudson area, which received $82.8 million in state funds,
Schleifer is co-chair of the Mid-Hudson region’s economic development council, and although Regeneron itself wasn’t awarded any specific funding, the company will likely benefit from improved infrastructure and beneficial tax incentives.
“There’s a lot of activity going on that we have in common,” Schleifer told the paper. “The regions are different, but we do have the commonality of a lot of high-tech business up and down the region.”
Regeneron is based in posh Westchester County and has around 2,500 total workers in New York state, with 900 at its East Greenbush site. The Albany region, where the plant is located, was awarded $60 million, a huge chunk of the total available.
“The state has a great set of diverse skills and opportunities, and we as a company saw that we could grow discovery research and corporate activities, as well as our manufacturing all throughout the state,” Schleifer said in the interview.
Part of that plan is doubling Regeneron’s workforce, he said, as Schleifer co-chairs the Mid-Hudson council with Dennis Murray, president of Marist College.
“When Dennis and I worked on our plan for the region, you could really feel our region is almost a model for the state because we have both very rural and very urban locations, just like the state does,” Schleifer said. “If we can make it work regionally, I think it’ll work for the whole state.”
