On Dec. 20, Arrowhead announced it had completed a transaction to purchase 13 acres of land in the Verona Technology Park in Verona, Wis., for a 255,000-square-foot drug research and manufacturing complex it plans to construct and open by the end of 2023.
The complex will consist of a 140,000-square-foot drug manufacturing facility and a 115,000-square-foot lab and office facility for research and development activities.
Arrowhead said it “intends to invest between $200 million and $250 million into the buildout of the facilities” with construction slated to begin by the end of this quarter.
When completed, Arrowhead said, the project will bring about 250 jobs to the Madison, Wis., region; Verona is a suburb of Madison.
Arrowhead is developing an array of drugs that are designed to treat a variety of diseases by using RNA technology to silence the genes that propagate the diseases — a process the company refers to as TRiM.
The company has research facilities at its Pasadena headquarters and at two other facilities — one in Madison and the other in San Diego. But this would be its first fully dedicated drug manufacturing facility, a sign that it believes it’s progressing from the research and development phase to commercialization of its drug therapies.
“Arrowhead’s pipeline of what we believe are industry-leading investigational RNAi medicines continues to expand rapidly,” the company’s chief executive, Christopher Anzalone, said in the announcement. “The new Arrowhead campus will allow us to support our growing pipeline and positions us well to advance the manufacturing process, including at commercial scale, of our TRiM-enabled drug candidates. We view this as a strong competitive advantage as we approach potential commercialization of our rapidly progressing clinical candidates.”
The facility would be Arrowhead’s second in Wisconsin; the other is a 111,000-square-foot research and development facility in Madison.
