A vaccine maker’s major expansion in Anne Arundel County could get a $2 million boost from the state.
Catalent, a New Jersey-based contract drug manufacturer with more than 17,000 employees, recently announced a $230 million expansion at its campus in Harmans near the Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.
The project is expected to add more than 700 jobs in six years and marks the latest expansion for a company that has been growing rapidly in Maryland in recent years. Catalent acquired Maryland's Paragon Bioservices Inc. in a $1.2 billion deal in May 2019, which included the vaccine and gene therapy manufacturer's 380 employees. Catalent also added hundreds of jobs later that year, and in 2020 announced a $130 million expansion that is ongoing.
The Maryland Department of Commerce approved the 10-year, conditional loan for Catalent in May 2020, but the company has yet to finalize paperwork for the loan, said Karen Glenn Hood, a spokeswoman for the Department of Commerce. No state funds have been disbursed, she added. It's unclear when the paperwork would need to be completed, but terms of the deal provided by Hood require Catalent to hit certain hiring benchmarks by the end of next year.
A spokeswoman for Catalent declined to talk about incentives the company could be receiving for its recent expansion.
Catalent currently has 10 commercial-scale manufacturing suites at the Harmans campus to produce gene therapies, the company said in a press release, but expects to have 18 by the end of 2022, when both expansions are complete.
According to the FDA, gene therapy is a "technique that modifies a person’s genes to treat or cure disease" and the treatment is being studied for a wide range of illnesses, including cancer and genetic and infectious diseases. BusinessWire reported this summer that the global market for gene therapy was more than $4 billion in 2020. With a predicted annual growth of more than 25%, the market could surpass $15 billion by 2025.
The Catalent campus in Harmans now encompasses about 350,000 square feet, the press release said, more than double its size a few years ago. The company said it plans to add an on-site cafeteria and parking garage.
According to Glenn Hood, the state loan would be forgiven if the company meets several benchmarks that appear to be in line with its recent expansion announcement:
- Catalent incurs $190 million of project costs by December 2022;
- Keeps 204 existing full-time positions;
- Creates 700 more full-time positions by December 2022 and keeps those positions for the length of the loan.
While Catalent has not finalized this deal with the state, Glenn Hood said that’s not uncommon as a company’s plans sometimes change during the course of projects or no longer need the loan.
Rosa Cruz, vice president of communications with the Anne Arundel Economic Development Corporation, said her agency began working with the vaccine maker in 2017, when it was still Paragon. Cruz said AAEDC provided the company $60,000 worth of workforce training grants.
