UPDATED: Pfizer closing Hospira plant in Colorado, 100 jobs to be lost

A week ago, Pfizer ($PFE) said it would expand its manufacturing by investing $200 million in a biologics facility in Massachusetts. This week it is subtracting, having targeted for closure one of the plants it picked up in its $15 billion deal last year for Hospira.

A Pfizer spokeswoman confirmed a story in the Daily Camera that the company determined the 50,000-square-foot facility in Boulder, CO, is being underutilized and so will phase it out, with its shuttering slated for 2019 and that 100 jobs will be affected. 

"Pfizer is evaluating its options for the Boulder plant, which may include facilitating the sale of the site, which is currently leased," she said in an email. 

The plant is among 14 that Hospira got in a $2 billion deal to buy Australian sterile injectables specialist Mayne Pharma in 2007 after Hospira was spun off of Abbott Laboratories. It was among four plants to get significant upgrades after the FDA issued a warning letter to the drugmaker in 2010 for several of Hospira's legacy plants. 

The announcement comes after Pfizer last week broke ground on a $200 million, 175,000-square-foot biologics manufacturing plant at its campus in Andover, MA, that will produce complex biologics and vaccines.

The Boulder area has been buffeted by changes in the drug industry. In 2014, Amgen ($AMGN) said it would close its 300,000-square-foot plant there as part of its cost-cutting program. Then last year, AstraZeneca ($AZN) bought the facility as part of an expansion of its biologics capabilities. The U.K. company said it was hoping to have the facility operational again in 2017 and expects to eventually hire 400 people to staff it.

- read the Daily Camera story 

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