Corden to invest nearly $500M to expand Boulder manufacturing facility

BOULDER — Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer Corden Pharma International GmbH plans to invest nearly $500 million over the next three years to expand its operations in Boulder in order to produce more GLP-1 peptides, which are components of several increasingly popular weight-loss and diabetes drugs. 

“We’re putting a new facility up on our campus on 55th Street,” Brian McCudden, Corden’s global head of peptide operations, told BizWest on Tuesday. “We have about 40 acres on 55th Street, and there’s open land in the campus area there.”

Corden will also be “expanding an existing manufacturing facility (also at the 55th Street campus) to make these peptides,” he said. 

All told, Corden expects to invest about $981 million to expand its peptide-manufacturing capacity in order to meet skyrocketing demand and a 1 billion-euro (nearly $1.09 billion) sales goal for peptide-platform drugs by 2028. More than half of Corden’s investment total will be spent upgrading its operations in Boulder, with the remainder earmarked for the expansion of a facility in an unnamed city “located in the heart of Europe,” the company said. 

The Boulder expansion project is expected to add about 80,000 square feet to Corden’s 55th Street campus. At buildout, the company will operate about 250,000 square feet, McCudden said. 

“This is the biggest expansion that the site has ever taken,” he said. “We’re a very key cog in the whole Corden Pharma network, and the team here has done a really good job — our customers appreciate it and our corporation appreciates it.”

Corden “is already pretty intensively into design work” for the expansion project, McCudden said. “I think groundbreaking will be sometime next year,” likely in the second half of 2025.

To staff the expanded Boulder operation, which employs about 630 workers, Corden plans to add about 170 new employees, McCudden said. “These are really great jobs all across the board: operators, mechanics, engineers, chemists, managers and supervisory staff.”

Corden, a contract development and manufacturing organization that produces drugs on an outsourced basis for other pharmaceutical companies, entered the Boulder market in 2011 when it acquired Roche Colorado Corp., which had operated from the 55th Street campus. The company boosted its local presence in 2017 when it acquired the Hospira Boulder manufacturing plant on Sterling Drive from New York-based Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE).

Corden’s planned expansion is a good sign for Boulder’s broader biotech sphere, which took a blow this spring when Pfizer began winding down research and development operations at its Walnut Street facility. 

“You’re always going to see up and down trends in specific companies based on their different product needs,” Boulder Chamber CEO John Tayer told BizWest. “However, the foundation that we’ve built over time here (in Boulder) from basic research to development to full-scale production is going to allow us to continue to have a sustained strong and growing biotech industry cluster.”

A nearly $500 million dollar investment in a company represents a win for the whole local economy, he said. 

“When there are investments in (primary industry) businesses, we see spillover benefits for many of our smaller supporting industry sectors, from the folks who perform the construction duties to the folks who provide business services,” Tayer said. “It’s a virtuous circle for our community — that’s why it’s so important that we continue to build a strong base of diverse primary industries in our city.”

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Corden Pharma International GmbH is headquartered in Switzerland not Germany. BizWest regrets the error.