Pfizer opens €30m unit to allow Cork site compete for manufacture of latest drugs

Pfizer has opened a new $30 million unit at its Ringaskiddy facility.

The New Product Technology Laboratory, which will employ 20 people, will allow the Cork plant to begin making drugs from the company’s R&D pipeline for the clinical trial phase.

Pfizer country head Paul Duffy said Pfizer currently has some 80 innovative therapies in its R&D pipeline and while Ringaskiddy does not make vaccines, which are among these new therapies, the new facility will allow it compete for the manufacture of many of the new small volume niche drugs.

The investment was announced last year as part of a $130 million investment in the US pharma giant's Irish network and has been a fillip for what is Pfizer's oldest manufacturing plant in Ireland

'Capacity'
"If you look at a site like Ringaskiddy back over time, a lot of the products coming to these sites were large blockbuster medicines such as Lipitor and Viagra," Dr Duffy said. "In the case of Lipitor, we were producing 250,000 kg per year – that requires a large amount of capacity.

“We’ve found over time that the type of medicines coming out of research has changed. We haven’t gone away totally from large volume products but there are a higher percentage coming through research that require smaller volumes because they are niche treatments.”

Dr Duffy said that the New Product Technology Laboratory will allow the Ringaskiddy facility to manufacture these new small volume targeted drugs, which are high value and are often manufactured in grams and kilos rather than thousands of kilos.

Speaking at the opening of the facility, Dr Duffy paid tribute to the 600 staff at the Ringaskiddy facility for their adaptability over the last five years or so, which he said had helped secure the new facility for the Cork operation. “If we hadn’t done that, if we had restructured and if we hadn’t changed, I don’t believe that we would be here today making this announcement . . . Securing this facility for the Cork operation was no small achievement as competition within companies is intense.”

Dr Duffy pointed out that for every 10,000 molecules that start the R&D cycle, only one or two of them will ever become medicines that are approved and launched.