Allergan Inc., the Irvine-based maker of Botox and other drugs, has made its latest big investment in Ireland.
Allergan said last week that it would spend $350 million to expand its Allergan Pharmaceuticals Ireland manufacturing and development plant in County Mayo.
About 200 jobs will be created over the next four years, Allergan said. The company already employs more than 900 people in Ireland.
The new plant will expand Allergan’s capacity for Botox and become a manufacturing base for the next generation of biologics now in its pipeline. Botox accounts for $1.5 billion of Allergan’s roughly $5 billion in annual revenue and has become more prominent in recent years, with new usage approvals both in the U.S. and overseas.
“We anticipate that demand for Botox will continue to grow, fueled by recent approvals of the product for treating (overactive bladder) and the treatment of chronic migraine in many countries around the world,” said Pat O’Donnell, Allergan Pharmaceuticals Ireland’s managing director.
Allergan has worked with IDA Ireland—the Industrial Development Agency—since it established operations in Westport, which is 150 miles west of capital city Dublin, about 30 years ago, IDA Ireland Chief Executive Barry O’Leary said.
“Thankfully, this is another very significant stage,” said O’Leary, who was in San Francisco last week at a JP Morgan healthcare investment conference.
IDA Ireland has a team around the world, including six representatives in the U.S. who pitch companies on establishing operations in Ireland. The company helped Allergan buy a technology park adjacent to its current Botox plant, O’Donnell told news agency RTE News.
O’Leary said that eight of the world’s 10 largest drug makers have manufacturing facilities in the country.
IDA offered Allergan unspecified economic incentives to facilitate the expansion.
“We never discuss the specifics of any incentive negotiation,” O’Leary said. “But regardless of whether they’re already in Ireland, or coming in new, the incentives are the same.”
IDA believes in providing “ongoing support” to companies that put operations in Ireland, he said.
Ireland also puts money into making sure it has skilled workers to make drugs. IDA invested $80 million in a national institute for bioprocessing research, run by four Irish universities, that will train workers to make biopharmaceuticals, O’Leary said.
“That’s an example of where we make interventions [to make sure] that Ireland’s overall offering is attractive to companies,” he said.
O’Leary noted Ireland has a “large life sciences cluster,” including medical-device makers.
Allergan will start construction work on the new Botox facility later this year, and that project could create 250 construction jobs, the company estimated.
Skilled Workers
Ireland isn’t Allergan’s only planned expansion. In November the company said it was scouting for a site in New Jersey to build a $12 million, 100,000-square-foot research and development center that could create about 400 new jobs over a three- to five-year period.
Allergan picked New Jersey for the center because of the state’s work force, which has large numbers of workers trained in the pharmaceutical industry, and its proximity to many clinical trial sites on the East Coast, Scott Whitcup, executive vice president for research and development, said last year.
The drug maker looks to put sites where there might be skilled work forces, “and there’s a big pharmaceutical industry that’s grown up on the East Coast in that area,” Whitcup said.
Allergan counts on Orange County’s work force to staff its headquarters and various research and development operations here. The company employs about 3,700 locally and 10,000 companywide.
“We certainly have tried to relocate people from California, but sometimes people are tough to relocate,” Whitcup said.
