Pfizer has invested $500 million in gene therapy

Pfizer has announced plans to build a $500 million facility in the U.S. and hire 300 people upon completion, a strong indication of its commitment to the gene therapy market.
The new plant, which will be located at the Pfizer plant in Sanford, North Carolina, already produces vaccines, including its best-selling children's vaccine prevnar13 and several experimental vaccines, and currently employs about 650 people.
company said, "the new capacity will be dedicated to manufacturing a single gene therapy using customized recombination adenovirus (raav) vectors
."
”Pfizer has made no secret of its plans to build a gene therapy business over the past few years, saying back in 2014 that it intended to establish a dedicated research and development business in the fast-growing therapeutic sector.
subsequently, a rapid partnership was established with Spark Therapeutics to introduce hemophilia b therapy, which is currently in phase 3 testing, and another agreement was reached with Sangamo on a candidate for haemophilia, which recently reported encouraging Phase 1/2 results.
Pfizer has also increased its stability by acquiring gene therapy specialist Bamboo Therapeutics for $700 million, adding a platform for recombination adenopathy and candidates for hyper-axon neuropathy and Duxing muscular dystrophy. It also owns a 15 per cent stake in Viet Therapeutics, a devastatingly rare, chronic and potentially life-threatening liver disease.Pfizer, meanwhile, has spun off what it sees as a core area of innovative drugs, sold its old and generic drugs to Mylan earlier this year and merged its consumer health business with GlaxoSmithKline into a joint venture in 2018.
these deals come at a time when big pharmaceutical companies have been frantically buying gene therapy companies for the past few years, eager not to be left behind as the industry matures.
, for example, agreed this year to buy Spark for $4.3 billion, although it is still struggling to close the deal, while Biogen bought Knightstar Therapeutics for $800 million.
The $500 million investment in Stanford will further strengthen Pfizer's leadership in gene therapy manufacturing technology," said Mike McDermott, head of Pfizer pharmaceuticals at PFizer. The expansion of the Sanford plant is expected to create hundreds of highly skilled jobs, which will increase Sanford's high-tech manufacturing environment and is part of our overall plan to invest about $5 billion in U.S. capital projects over the next few years. ”（cyy123.com）