Economy & Economic Development  October 10, 2016

AstraZeneca pays $64.5M for Amgen’s Longmont campus

LONGMONT – London-based pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca PLC, which last year bought Amgen’s manufacturing facility in Boulder, has closed on the $64.5 million purchase of Amgen’s Longmont plant.

The most recent buy includes 159 acres of vacant land just to the west of Amgen’s campus.

AstraZeneca officials announced the purchase Monday morning. AstraZeneca said in a news release that the Longmont site will be used to support the company’s existing operations in Boulder. The company added that the Longmont facility “will be staffed over time and according to business needs as the company’s pipeline matures and expansions are deemed necessary.”

“The Longmont facility adds to our expanding biologics commercial manufacturing capabilities as we prepare for our exciting future biologic medicines,” Darren Dasburg, AstraZeneca’s site director in Boulder, said in the release. “Integrating this site into our existing operations network will provide AstraZeneca and MedImmune, our global biologics research and development arm, with flexible biological manufacturing capacity to quickly bring new innovative treatments to patients.”

Amgen had originally listed its six-building Longmont campus spread across 70 acres for sale last year for $85 million. The adjacent 159 acres had been listed separately at the time for $9 million.

Amgen halted production at the facility in 2014, announcing that it was closing plants in Boulder and Longmont as well as two in Washington state. AstraZeneca bought Amgen’s 170,000-square-foot Boulder facility at 5550 Airport Blvd. for $14.6 million last year, saying that it alone could eventually employ up to 400 people.

The Longmont campus includes 692,000 square feet of building space. But AstraZeneca officials said their acquisition won’t mean a significant amount of hiring in Longmont initially.

Abby Bozarth, a spokeswoman for the company, said AstraZeneca will start utilizing the warehouse on the campus immediately to support the Boulder manufacturing operations. But she said, “No additional decisions have been taken by AstraZeneca for product placement or investment at this time. However, the Longmont site has the capability and infrastructure needed to support our exciting future product portfolio.”

Bozarth, who said AstraZeneca so far has 130 employees in Boulder, added that the company has no immediate plans for the 159 acres of vacant land purchased but that “it gives us capacity should we need it in the future.”

Jessica Erickson, president and CEO of the Longmont Economic Development Partnership, said the property sale is a positive development for Longmont even if it doesn’t mean a lot of immediate job creation in the city.

“We’re definitely encouraged by the investment that they’re making here in Longmont and Colorado and the implications that has for future investment,” Erickson said.

Erickson said the LEDP and the city of Longmont offered no incentives related to AstraZeneca’s purchase of the Amgen facility.

“Our incentives have job creation requirements, and so the acquisition of real estate does not trigger our ability to offer incentives for a project,” she said. “At the point that they would be talking about creating jobs is when we would be triggered to potentially put incentive offers out there.”

When Amgen shut down operations at the Longmont site in 2014, company officials said they were moving the production of anemia drug Epogen to a plant at the company’s Thousand Oaks, Calif. headquarters.

Eric Dienstbach, the Binswanger broker who was listing the campus for Amgen, told the Boulder Daily Camera last week that Amgen was under contract to sell the property but that it also had a leaseback arrangement for “certain aspects” of the facility.

Dienstbach declined to comment on the sale Monday. An Amgen spokesperson on Monday also declined to comment on details of the deal with AstraZeneca or on whether Amgen would be resuming manufacturing operations there at any point.

“We stopped production in 2014, and we have produced enough Epogen drug substance intermediate to meet the projected demand,” Amgen spokeswoman Kristen Davis said in an email. “A manufacturing plant at Amgen’s Thousand Oaks headquarters will produce Epogen drug substance intermediate for future patient needs.”

LONGMONT – London-based pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca PLC, which last year bought Amgen’s manufacturing facility in Boulder, has closed on the $64.5 million purchase of Amgen’s Longmont plant.

The most recent buy includes 159 acres of vacant land just to the west of Amgen’s campus.

AstraZeneca officials announced the purchase Monday morning. AstraZeneca said in a news release that the Longmont site will be used to support the company’s existing operations in Boulder. The company added that the Longmont facility “will be staffed over time and according to business needs as the company’s pipeline matures and expansions are deemed necessary.”

“The Longmont facility adds…

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