With Amgen on the way, Southern Wake County may be next hot spot for biotech companies
Southern Wake County is continuing to become a significant player in the biotech industry as industry giant Amgen broke ground Monday on a manufacturing facility that could eventually employ more than 350 people.
Amgen’s new plant, which is scheduled to open by 2025, will be built down the road from another massive biotech investment from Fujifilm Diosynth, which is building a $1.5 billion plant that could employ more than 700 people. Pharmaceutical company Seqirus also has a significant facility in the town.
It’s the culmination of a years-long strategy from the town of Holly Springs, home to both the Amgen and Fujifilm plants, which has for years worked to attract life science companies.
“Holly Springs really positioned themselves to do this,” said Wake County Commissioner Sig Hutchinson Monday at a ground-breaking event for Amgen.
Hutchinson noted the town has become a generous partner in finding land deals, offering incentives and making it easier for construction to get underway within the town’s boundaries.
Holly Springs is also benefiting from the fact that land prices in Research Triangle Park, historically home to most of the region’s biotech activity, have gotten much more expensive in the past decade.
“I think there’s a lot more to come down here,” Hutchinson added.
Amgen’s plans for growth
Since the pandemic started, there has been a wave of investment in putting more biotech manufacturing in the U.S.
Amgen, in addition to the Holly Springs facility, is also building a plant in Ohio. Together the two plants will employ more than 700 people.
The Holly Springs plant will make the active ingredients that go into the many drugs Amgen manufactures, including ones for heart disease, osteoperosis and psoriatic arthritis.
Amgen announced its Holly Springs expansion last August, after it received state and local incentives worth more than $35 million, The News & Observer previously reported. The jobs will pay on average $119,510.
Robert Bradway, Amgen’s chief executive officer, said the North Carolina and Ohio plants are critical for meeting increased demands for its products.
“The demographics are in our favor,” Bradway said in an interview. “We have an aging population, globally. As people age, they become more vulnerable to chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease, cancer, osteoporosis, therapies where we’re very active in advancing.
“These two expansion facilities will enable us to continue to grow to meet the demand for our medicines,” he said.
Bradway added that Amgen’s investment was made possible because of federal tax reform that came in 2017. Amgen was one of the biggest winners of that tax reform, which let companies repatriate cash that had been held overseas, Marketwatch reported.
“I want to underscore that we were able to make a decision to put these jobs back here in North Carolina and in Ohio thanks to the tax reform that happened several years ago,” Bradway said. That reform “made these locations competitive with others elsewhere in the world.”
Bradway said many companies, like Amgen, had been considering expansions outside of the U.S. until that reform.
Creating a diverse workforce
Amgen officials said they considered more than a dozen locations before picking Holly Springs, which the company said had important access to both talent and other life-science companies.
In particular, Bradway said, Amgen was interested in the Triangle because of its diverse population.
Amgen is one of dozens of large U.S. companies to join an effort called OneTen, which was formed after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of police. The effort aims to unite companies in an effort to hire 1 million Black Americans to good-paying jobs over the next 10 years.
Gov. Roy Cooper, who attended Monday’s ground breaking, said North Carolina is ready to work with Amgen to find diverse talent. He noted that the state has more four-year historically Black colleges and universities than any other state.
“You want to hire a diverse workforce, we can help with that,” Cooper said at the event. “In North Carolina, diversity is not only the right thing to do, it is better for the bottom line.”
For its part, Amgen said it also planned to hire more workers without four-year degrees and offer more training opportunities.
Amgen also said it would introduce its Amgen Biotech Experience program to some Wake County schools. The program gives middle school and high school students a chance to work with high-tech lab equipment and introduce them to careers in biotech.
Amgen said it hopes to launch the program locally this fall.
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
This story was originally published March 7, 2022 at 6:24 PM.
