An internal assessment showed ImmunoGen would benefit from a move to an outsourcing model for manufacturing and testing, CEO Mark Enyedy told stakeholders last week.
“The CMO [contract manufacturing organisation] and the centralized testing world is evolving rapidly and so we wanted to make sure that we had increased access to that expertise to take advantages in capacity and technology.”
This firm now plans to close its Norwood, Massachusetts facility in early 2019, resulting in the loss of 20 jobs.
“Capacity requirements for our Norwood facility were declining over time, particularly as we did some mapping in our long-range planning,” Enyedy said.
“In addition to that, we do quality testing there and we were moving the quality testing for pivotal programmes out to the contract manufacturers, who were going to produce both the pivotal and the commercial material.”
In total, the decommissioning of the facility and revisions to manufacturing and quality operations will generate over $20m in savings over the next five years, Enyedy added.
The announcement was made during ImmunoGen’s fourth quarter 2017 results. Total Q4 revenues stood at $39.4m, up 185% on the previous year and attributed to license and milestone fees from drug conjugate partners including Sanofi and Debiopharm.