Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Amgen - no luck for the Irish

The fallout from Amgen's woes spread to Ireland last week, as the company said it would "postpone indefinitely" plans to build a $1 billion biologics production facility at Carrigtwohill, near Cork City.

The move is a major blow for IDA Ireland, the state agency responsible for promoting inward investment, since winning the Amgen project over competing bids from Singapore and Switzerland was touted as its biggest success in 2006 across any industrial sector.

Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based Amgen originally had disclosed plans to build process development, bulk manufacturing and fill and finish facilities on a 133-acre campus at the beginning of 2006. The project would have doubled its fill and finish capacity and increased its bulk manufacturing capacity by 50 percent.

Under the original plan, the plant was to have employed 1,100 workers by 2010. The schedule was moved out to 2012 in the spring of this year, following new data that indicated cancer patients on Aranesp (darbepoetin alfa) who were not undergoing chemotherapy had an increased risk of death.

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