$150M Regeneron expansion to add 300 jobs

MOUNT PLEASANT – Regeneron Pharmaceuticals will invest $150 million to expand its property at the Landmark at Eastview, a move the company says will create at least 300 jobs.

The announcement came Thursday, the same day Gov. Andrew Cuomo visited the company’s headquarters to celebrate the completion of a previous expansion that added two new buildings with lab and office space to the bio-pharmaceutical company’s campus.

Cuomo told employees that government had to be a partner in fostering entrepreneurial growth. When his father, Mario, was governor in the 1980s, he OK’d $250,000 for the now 27-year-old company.

“When the seed comes from academia, it has to fall on fertile soil and it needs to be developed and cultivated and that’s where government comes in,” Cuomo said.

Empire State Development provided the company with $10.2 million in Excelsior Jobs Program tax credits for the two completed buildings. ESD will provide $5 million in additional tax credits for the upcoming expansion, which will include 192,000 square feet of lab and office space and a 400-space parking garage.

The company has rapidly grown from four employees at its start, to 685 in 2007, to more than 4,000 now. Regeneron says it hired 1,200 new employees this year, 945 of them in New York state. In addition to Eastview, an area that spans the Greenburgh-Mount Pleasant border, Regeneron has an industrial operations and product supply facility in Rensselaer, New York.

Its two new buildings that formally opened this week added nearly 300,000 square feet to its total space, which is more than 1 million square feet. The celebration included speeches from patients who described the positive effects of Regeneron-developed drugs on their eczema and familial hypercholesterolemia, a genetic disorder that causes high cholesterol and can lead to heart disease or stroke.

President and CEO Leonard Schleifer addressed the changing health-care landscape and said the American system of developing, patenting and pricing competitively is what has fostered advances in the field. He said no one at the company went home at night afraid that scientists in Russia would beat them to market.

“It’s not because the Russians aren't smart, it’s not because they’re not well educated or technologically sophisticated — think Sputnik, the arms race, think of their military power,” he said. “It’s because the incentives don’t exist in Russia for this to happen and there’s no ecosystem to support it.”

Twitter: @marklungariello