The Triangle’s big slice of NC bio/pharma pie – List Insights

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The life sciences industry is no doubt big business in North Carolina with more than 735 bioscience companies and a total of more than 66,000 industry workers.

And the Triangle has its fair share of that pie. In fact, more than a handful of life sciences firms are among the area’s largest overall employers, and the six largest bio/pharma firms in the Triangle each employ more than 1,500 people locally.

Biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies are the focus of one of this week’s Triangle Business Journal list.

Here’s a closer look at the top five:

  1. Pfizer: The New York-based company is steadily increasing its presence in the Triangle. In late September, the giant shelled out $10.3 million for a 16-acre Durham property set to be the company’s new location for its clinical manufacturing facility, currently based in Chapel Hill. Pfizer has been investing heavily in the Triangle in the past year, announcing in August its plans for a half-billion dollar expansion of its Sanford footprint, which is expected to bring 300 jobs to the region.
  2. Grifols: The plasma-focused therapy company has seen its Triangle workforce expand to 2,517, up from 2,183 a year ago. Companywide, its headcount has increased from 21,000 to 24,000 from early 2019 to now.
  3. bioMerieux: This company has boosted its Triangle workforce by 800 to around 2,000 currently. The increase is partly due to a country-wide effort to fight antibiotic resistant infections, which falls in this firm’s wheelhouse as it sells diagnostic equipment to help providers identify what patients may be infected with.
  4. GSK: Earlier this month, CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and GSK announced a new collaboration aimed at helping the global effort to develop a vaccine for the 2019-nCoV virus, otherwise known as coronavirus. Thus far, the virus has been blamed for over 2,000 deaths.
  5. BASF: The ag-bio company also made TBJ‘s latest list of largest patent assignees, with 25 in all of 2018 that included input from a Triangle-area inventor.

Source: Triangle Business Journal