Call your Realtor: Pfizer has put its ex-Exubera plant up for sale. The Terre Haute, Indiana, facility had been in the Pfizer family since 1948, when the drugmaker bought it from the U.S. government. Since then, it's undergone a variety of expansions and upgrades, including more than $300 million in investment since 1999. At its peak, the 580,000-square-foot facility on almost 1,000 acres employed some 800 people.
Most recently, the plant was used to make Exubera, Pfizer's inhaled insulin product. But just one year into the product's launch, Pfizer pulled the plug on the formulation because of lackluster sales. Exubera just hadn't caught on with patients, who disliked the oversized inhaler device. And payers were slow to adopt the inhaled formula, too. Pfizer took a $2.8 billion charge to shut down production; about 600 Terre Haute workers were idled at the time.
- read the story in the Indianapolis Star
- see the Wall Street Journal Health Blog post