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One of Boston's older life-sciences facilities laying off workers as owner figures out what to do with it after a key contract ran out
By adamg on Fri, 03/03/2023 - 10:11am
BioProcess International reports the owner of the glass and brick structure with giant tanks filled with Chinese hamster ovary cells next to the Allston/Cambridge turnpike exit is laying off more than 200 workers as it figures out what to do with the tanks and cells now that its contract to produce a particular type of enzyme has ended.
When National Resilience bought the 500 Soldiers Field Rd. plant last year from Sanofi - which inherited it when it bought Genzyme in 2011 - it said it planned to add several hundred jobs. The company, founded by an MIT graduate, specializes in helping other companies develop and manufacture drugs and related compounds.
But the company's contract with Sanofi to continue the plant's production of Cerezyme, an enzyme that helps people with Gaucher disease, ended last year and it's yet to find another drug maker that wants to hire it to produce things at the 310,000-square-foot plant.
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Comments
There are always jobs in new
There are always jobs in new life sciences buildings
There's a difference between
There's a difference between office buildings which are set up to be able to do some lab work and a plant that produces medication on an industrial scale. The Boston area has more of those too, but one presumes it's a more specialized kind of real estate to sell.
for the love of God, man
don't flush that stuff through Deer island. We'll have two-headed lobstahs down the Cape.
All the way to Deer Island?
I guess you haven't seen the three-eyed fish in the Charles River there.
Top 5 Corporate Move In Boston History
Genzyme got Governor Weld to give this place a huge break in the early 90's when Genzyme mentioned that they were going to building a plant in ArkansBamaZonaSconsin or someplace where they never had any intention of building.
They got a great deal on the land which was part of the Turnpike's holdings.
I always liked the building. Until they put the extension on it about 15 years ago it always looked like a late 80's PoMo church to me.
It's Harvard's land
They might have needed some agreement with the state to build right next to the pike ramps, but my understanding is that the lease on the land was between Genzyme & Harvard.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/9/16/harvard-allston-cover/
Thanks
I think a bit of Turnpike land was involved as well but you are right, they own most of the land along Dedham Parish Road (I kid you now) behind it.
They are everywhere...
Giant tanks filled with Chinese hamster ovary cells
Can they be donated to
Can they be donated to Ukraine to help hold the line near Bakhmut? The Soviet-era T-72 models used by most of the Russian forces can't possibly be equipped to deal with those!
Magoo sez
Magoo has a vat of hamster ovaries. It is all part of Magoo’s plan to corner the hamster market. Mwaa hahhahaha! Magoo.
Sell it to Harvard?
They've bought up almost everything else in that area
It's already their land
I put a link in my other comment and you can see on the map that the land is owned by Harvard. I imagine that the current company has the lease that Genzyme initially signed now.
Hopefully it won't come to
Hopefully it won't come to this, but I did think up a way that BioProcess could at least cut their losses (TL;DR: discount omelettes).
So a Life Science factory is
So a Life Science factory is laying people off while Life Science labs continue to proliferate in Boston. What are these new labs for? From this story it doesn't seem like they're producing anything that one of our factories can use.
Pharmaceutical production is VERY specific
You build out a plant to follow an approved and tightly regulated production process to produce whatever it is you are making. That may not be readily transition-able to a different product.
If I had to guess, most of the new "life science" labs are built leaning towards the discovery phase, not development and production. Even if process development work is happening here, actual production of the drug may not be done here.