About a year and a half after telegraphing plans to shift its headquarters from New Jersey to Philadelphia, CDMO Adare Pharma Solutions appears to be turning out the lights at another facility in the City of Brotherly Love, with more than a hundred layoffs to follow.
Adare is letting go of 137 workers at its manufacturing and packaging plant on Orthodox Street in Philadelphia, according to a new Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act filing with the state of Pennsylvania. The staff reduction will begin on the first of March next year and run through the end of June, according to the notice.
The reason given for the cuts was listed as “Closing,” suggesting the Adare site will be powering down.
The company did not immediately respond to Fierce Pharma’s request for comment on the site’s fate.
In a statement, the company told the Philadelphia Inquirer that it's closing the site "due to adverse economic situations for our clients." The site is slated to shut down in stages between between March and June of next year, the news outlet reported.
Adare told the Inquirer that it will attempt to help laid-off employees find jobs at the CDMO's other sites and does not plan to move its corporate headquarters, which is also in Philadelphia.
Adare’s Orthodox Street site in Philadelphia spans 128,000 square feet, split between core manufacturing space and quality control facilities, with capabilities on deck for commercial production of tablets and capsules, according to the CDMO’s website.
Adare is moving to close the site more than a year after announcing plans to relocate its headquarters from New Jersey to Pennsylvania. At the time, the company noted that it planned to spend $16.8 million to expand its two preexisting Philadelphia sites—one at Orthodox Street and the other on Dungan Road—and set up new corporate digs at its Dungan Road location.
The Dungan Road site encompasses 175,000 square feet and houses both packaging and warehousing, Adare says on its website.
As part of the relocation project, Adare said last year that it would create some 115 new jobs in the state and “retain 200 existing Pennsylvania jobs.”
As Adare slims down in Pennsylvania, the CDMO is expanding elsewhere: In late October, the company said that it had completed a “major expansion” of its Pessano facility in Milan in a move designed to significantly expand Adare’s European packaging and warehousing capacity.
As of this fall, the facility had been authorized by Italy’s medicines agency and was producing both validation and commercial drug batches, Adare said at the time.