As Azurity Pharmaceuticals rethinks its manufacturing footprint, the privately held company is parting ways with a clutch of employees in its home state of Massachusetts.
Azurity is eliminating 75 roles in Wilmington, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) alert filed with the state of Massachusetts. The move dovetails with the decision to sunset the company’s manufacturing operations in the Boston suburb, an Azurity spokesperson told Fierce Pharma over email.
The staff reduction process is set to begin in mid-September and run through Dec. 31, according to the state layoff notice.
Azurity has been winding down production in Wilmington over the past six months and plans to formally close the manufacturing facility by the end of 2025, a company spokesperson said.
The strategy reflects the growth of Azurity’s commercial portfolio, much of which requires specialized manufacturing capabilities.
In turn, the company has “prioritized manufacturing these products with partners with expertise in manufacturing these dosage formats,” the spokesperson explained.
“Our internal manufacturing has become a smaller part of our overall supply chain, and we are strategically moving our manufacturing of the in-house products to other domestic manufacturing partners,” she said.
Most of Azurity’s drugs are already produced with the help of contract manufacturers, and in the future, “that will be the case for all of our medicines,” the spokesperson said.
Azurity fills a unique niche in the pharmaceutical industry, focusing on the reformulation of established therapeutics to help medicines reach overlooked patient groups.
In the past few years, Azurity has secured FDA approvals for a new formulation of Novartis’ chronic myeloid leukemia drug Tasigna that doesn’t require patients to take the medicine on an empty stomach, a liquid version of an epilepsy drug for those that have difficulty taking tablets and a grape-flavored version of the muscle relaxant baclofen for people with multiple sclerosis.
“Azurity continues to evolve, and this move allows us to focus on our core strengths of dose-form innovation at speed and scale, and commercialization of medicines for overlooked patients,” Azurity’s spokesperson said of the staff reduction and planned closure of the company’s Wilmington plant.
Although Azurity is slimming down in production, the company continues to grow along other avenues.
Back in March, the reformulation specialist announced the close of its acquisition of Covis Group, converting the specialty drugmaker into a wholly-owned Azurity subsidiary. Notably, Covis is the company behind the much-scrutinized preterm birth drug Makena, which had its accelerated approval revoked by the FDA in 2023, one month after the company agreed to pull the medicine from the U.S. market.