HOLLY SPRINGS – Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies chose Holly Springs for a huge new drug factory and created hundreds of jobs with average salaries of more than $ 95,000.
The news that the company was considering North Carolina for the plant came in January. Texas was also considered for the plant, according to North Carolina officials.
A rendering of the future Holly Springs facility provided by Fujifilm.
“There was strong competition for this, but it ended up in the right place,” Governor Roy Cooper said of Fujifilm Diosynth Chief Executive Martin Meeson during a ceremony on Thursday afternoon in Holly Springs.
Meeson called the planned plant “a major milestone” for the company, which is part of Japan-based Fuijifilm. It will be the largest cell culture contract development and manufacturing facility in North America, he said.
“The excitement is all about the number of patients that we will be able to reach and the medications that we can take to them in this facility that we are creating,” he said. “This project is about looking to the future and how we are going to deliver medicines in the coming decades.”
No timetable for launching the plant has been set, Meeson said.
Fujifilm Diosynth already has a factory in Morrisville, which manufactures more than 60 products, including treatments for prostate cancer, inherited diseases and a potential coronavirus vaccine created by Novavax. Former President Donald Trump visited the factory last year to publicize his government’s vaccine development program.
Meeson said the Holly Springs site will be similar to a factory in Denmark that produces vaccines and other therapies at the cellular level.
“We’ll start with a small bottle, [and] we will transform it into 20,000 liter tanks, purify it, send it in the appropriate format, pack it, label it and return it to our partners for distribution worldwide, ”he said.
Holly Springs’ water reuse system will help the company achieve its sustainability goals, and Fujifilm Diosynth’s partnerships with North Carolina colleges will provide a pipeline for a skilled workforce.
“We are really pleased to be supported by many very strong academic institutions that are constantly training and producing this workforce for the future,” he said.
The Holly Springs plant will create about 725 jobs between 2024 and 2028, according to an agreement between the company and the state Department of Commerce.
The company will invest R $ 1.5 billion until December 2024 and maintain 637 jobs that are already based in the Triangle, according to the agreement. An additional US $ 500 million will be invested later.
“Identifying a location to locate a biofabrication project of this magnitude depends on the availability of highly trained people, a high-level business climate and a hyper-collaborative ecosystem, all within a diverse and strong biological science cluster. And that place is North Carolina, ”said Bill Bullock, senior vice president for economic development and statewide operations at the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.
Fujifilm’s decision to build a new plant in Holly Springs is a major victory for the North Carolina life sciences industry
“Holly Springs, in particular, is a model community on how to develop and implement a long-term strategy to attract life science jobs and investments, going back to Novartis’ decision to locate its vaccine campus there in 2006,” said Bullock.
The state’s Economic Investment Committee approved an investment grant for employment development of up to $ 19.7 million for the project. Fujifilm Diosynth would have to meet the annual hiring and investment goals over a 12-year period to obtain the money, which is the refund of taxes withheld at employees’ source. Officials estimate that the plant will generate more than $ 160 million in state tax revenues during the period.
The company also received a $ 2 million grant from the One North Carolina Fund, a discretionary cash donation program that allows the governor to respond quickly to competitive economic development projects.
The job news was the second biggest for North Carolina on Thursday. Previously, Google announced that it had chosen Durham for a new cloud computing engineering center. About 1,000 jobs are expected to be added to this facility.
It is the latest in a series of corporate investments released this year, many of them focused on the life sciences.
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