Brammer Bio seeking tax increment financing for proposed new manufacturing site in Massachusetts

Brammer Bio, which was acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific earlier this year, is seeking tax increment financing for a proposed new manufacturing facility in Norton, Massachusetts.

Brammer Bio, which provides development and manufacturing services for cell and gene therapies, will ask for a TIF agreement in a meeting of residents scheduled for Aug. 26.

Details of the TIF are still being worked out, Town Manager Michael Yunits told The Sun Chronicle.

The company, which employs about 600 people in other locations, expects to employ about 300 people in Norton by 2021, according to the newspaper.

Ron O’Brien, a spokesman for Thermo Fisher, told FiercePharmaManufacturing that the project is still in a preliminary stage and additional information such as size and projected cost will be released in the near future.

In recent years, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals built a $200 million, 200,000-square-foot facility in Norton’s industrial park near Taunton.

Thermo Fisher, a CDMO, announced in March that it was buying Brammer Bio for $1.7 billion as part of an effort to expand its presence in the growing gene therapies market. At the time of the announcement, Brammer Bio, which is based in Cambridge, said it expected to produce $150 million in revenue this year and outpace the market growth rate of 25% for the midterm. Thermo Fisher said it expected the acquisition to add about $0.10 per share in the first full year of ownership.

With the growth of gene therapies, many biotechs have begun to invest in building their own specialized manufacturing facilities as well as looking to CDMOs for additional capacity. Last year, CDMO leader Lonza opened a 300,000-square-foot facility in a Houston suburb that it touts as the largest dedicated cell-and-gene-therapy manufacturing facility in the world.