Nexus Pharmaceuticals, a manufacturer of generic drugs and other products, aims to double its workforce in under a decade as it adds more production lines at its Pleasant Prairie facility.
The Illinois company first broke ground in 2019 on the $100 million project, which was the first greenfield generic drug production facility established in the United States in 30 years. That’s according to John Cook, the company’s vice president of manufacturing.
“Typically we’re pretty agnostic on the types of products we manufacture and market,” Cook said in a recent interview. “So we have products used mainly in cardiovascular areas, anti-spasmodics, some used during COVID — we have a product that’s basically an anesthetic that helps when they intubate people.”
Cook said the business targets product areas that frequently see drug shortages, in hopes of filling those gaps in the market. He noted at least 240 drugs are currently in short supply, based on FDA figures, with many of those falling under the hospital injectable market targeted by Nexus Pharmaceuticals.
In selecting the 16-acre site for its Pleasant Prairie operations — where about 85 members of its 200-person workforce are located — company leaders wanted to leave space for further expansion, Cook explained.
“We have a site master plan right now that will allow us to add four more filling lines on this site, which is something that we’re really looking forward to in the future from a growth perspective,” he said.
That meant designing and building a facility that could allow for adding more domestic capacity without disrupting ongoing production, he said. At the time, many other companies were building generic production sites overseas in places like India and China, Cook said.
The company earlier this month received a nod from the Facility of the Year Award program for this effort, which is dubbed Project Tomorrow. Cook said getting that national recognition at the award ceremony in Las Vegas was an invaluable experience for the business.
“Some of the rationale of what we were trying to do, what we were trying to accomplish from the perspective of trying to bring domestic manufacturing back to the states, I think it rang well with the judges,” he said.
Nexus currently has one vial-filling line at the site that can process up to 300 vials per minute, Cook said. But the company last week was installing a second line in Pleasant Prairie, with plans to submit related filings to the FDA this year. Future additions could include oncology products such as chemotherapy drugs as well as vaccination products, according to Cook.
As these and other expansions occur in the coming years, the business expects to have at least 400 employees in fewer than 10 years.
“Our goal here at Nexus is to address that need out there for drug shortage products that are critical,” Cook said. “A lot of these products are very, very low-margin … that’s one of the reasons they’re on drug shortage.”
That includes “basic” products for hospitals such as potassium chloride, sterile water — “things that are used in hospitals on a daily basis,” Cook said.
“We just want to make sure that we’re fulfilling that need for the country here, first and foremost, and the state of Wisconsin,” he said. “And we’ll continue to do that. We’re continuing to push for domestic manufacturing, so that we don’t run into supply chain issues and things of that nature.”
See more on the Pleasant Prairie site here: https://www.nexuspharma.net/our-facility
–By Alex Moe
