Drug industry is expanding in Rhode Island
01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, May 27, 2008
By Paul Edward Parker
Journal Staff Writer
Looking across the Rhode Island technology business landscape these days reveals an ever-growing imprint of the pharmaceutical industry.
For most of this decade, Amgen or its predecessors have been making Enbrel, a highly successful arthritis drug, at a plant in West Warwick.
Now, Alexion Pharmaceuticals is poised to join Amgen in the Ocean State’s high-tech drug industry. The company, headquartered in Cheshire, Conn., has finished retrofitting the former Dow Chemical plant in Smithfield.
“Construction is completed. The equipment is installed,” Alexion spokesman Irving Adler said. “It’s now a state-of-the-art facility.”
For the rest of the year, Alexion expects to run testing on the equipment, with an eye toward applying for regulatory approval to begin manufacturing next year. “The overall validation process is on schedule,” Adler said.
The past year has been pivotal for the company, as it began marketing its first drug, Soliris, to customers in the United States in April. Soliris is currently produced under contract by other companies. The Smithfield plant will be Alexion’s first manufacturing facility.
Soliris, which treats a rare, life-threatening blood disorder called paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, sold well its first nine months on the market, logging net sales of $66.4 million, according to the company.
Still, the startup company has a ways to go before turning a profit. It reported net revenue of $65 million last year, against expenses of $165 million, for an operating loss of $100 million. That’s a step in the right direction from 2006, when the company had revenues of less than $2 million and an operating loss of $132 million.
For Amgen, the last few months have been a period of regaining stability after layoffs rocked the company in the wake of concerns about the safety of its top-selling anemia drugs, Aranesp and Epogen. In September, the Thousand Oaks, Calif., company announced that it would lay off 450 factory workers in West Greenwich, the only place that the company makes Enbrel. But demand for Enbrel was so high that the company scaled that back a month later, laying off only 300 of its 1,600 workers in Rhode Island.
Since then, things have looked up for Amgen, largely because of the success of Enbrel.
In the first quarter this year, the company reported first-quarter profits rose 2 percent from the same period a year ago. Net income for the quarter rose from $1.11 billion or 94 cents a share a year ago to $1.14 billion, or $1.04 a share. In the same time, Enbrel revenues leaped 30 percent to $951 million, beating analysts’ estimates of $868 million by a wide margin.
Company spokeswoman Mary Klem said Amgen had no plans for further adjustments to its work force, either layoffs or hiring.
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