Swiss firm to set up at The Landmark

A Swiss clinical manufacturing company that serves the international biopharmaceutical industry will open a U.S. division next year at The Landmark at Eastview.

Micro-Macinazione USA Inc. will spend an estimated $5 million to build and renovate 10,000 square feet of office, laboratory and production space at the life sciences and technology business campus owned by BioMed Realty Trust, Inc. The project is expected to take eight to 10 months.

The company will employ 10 people at the start and expects to double its space at The Landmark and at least double the number of employees there “in a couple of years,” said Carl Edelman, a Katonah resident and general manager of the newly formed company.

The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Micro-Macinazione SA (MicMac), a privately owned Swiss corporation founded in 1970 that has grown to become the leading European contractor for micronization, a process in which bulk active ingredients are reduced to very fine particles for use in pharmaceutical drugs.

“We are the biggest micronizer in Europe and now we”™re going to start in North America,” Edelman said. “We have contracts in Europe with a lot of the big bios and a lot of the big pharmas” headquartered in the U.S., including Bristol-Myers-Squibb, Pfizer and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, he said. “They”™ve been asking us to set up in the states.”

For companies sending active pharmaceutical ingredients to MicMac”™s Swiss facilities, “It”™s very difficult to ship across the border, especially after 9/11,” Edelman said.

At The Landmark at Eastview, an eight-building, approximately 752,000-square-foot complex just off the Saw Mill River Parkway in the towns of Greenburgh and Mount Pleasant that formerly was the Union Carbide Research and Development Campus, “They”™re really set up to handle the needs of biopharmaceutical companies like us,” Edelman said. “The things that we need, they have.”

The Landmark”™s 20 tenants include Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., a company of more than 450 employees that last spring announced its expansion into a 360,000-square-foot, $145 million facility under construction on the 275-acre campus, and Progenics Pharmaceuticals Inc., which recently received Deloitte USA”™s New York Region Technology Fast 50 Award as one of the fastest-growing businesses among the state”™s technology, media and telecommunications and life sciences companies.

“The tenants that are there now might be some of our customers in the future,” Edelman said.

“New York”™s a great spot for us because it”™s in between the two Meccas ”“ the Mecca of bios in Boston and the Mecca of pharmaceuticals in New Jersey and Philadelphia,” he said.

The general manager said MicMac also was considering a location in Brunswick, N.J. The state of New Jersey offered more in lease assistance and relocation expenses, “but the facility wasn”™t as good as Landmark,” Edelman said.

The Westchester County Industrial Development Agency (IDA) this month agreed to financially assist the project with an estimated $100,000 sales tax exemption. Edelman said the company has begun talks with the Empire State Development Corp. for additional benefits.