Alexion Sales Could Hit $1B; Who Gets The Jobs?

Imagine a disease in which a part of your immune system runs wild, destroying red blood cells and causing blood clots, strokes and, often, death within a few years.

Now imagine a treatment that can curb that runaway process, saving the red blood cells and therefore the patient.

And try imagining lots of people in New Haven finding work — helping to create or market treatments like that one.

The medical breakthrough isn’t imaginary anymore. It’s Soliris, the jewel in the crown of Alexion Pharmaceuticals, which Tuesday announced plans to move its headquarters from Cheshire to New Haven in about three years.

The company promises to create more than 300 new jobs and bring another 350 existing workers to town in the new 100 College Street building in the emerging Downtown Crossing development project.

One question now is whether many people from the city can get those jobs — in essence, whether Alexion’s research accomplishments can help spark a jobs breakthrough for New Haven, where the lack of employment opportunities in well-paid jobs is a constant issue.

It was on the minds of aldermanic leaders who toured Alexion’s current Cheshire headquarters Tuesday. It’s on the minds of other New Haven leaders as they cheer the capture of a corporate prize for the city.

New Haven Mayor John DeStefano noted that the big Alexion announcement Tuesday occurred the same day that 1,000 students were graduating from city high schools.

“Right now these kids are not ready for [all] the kinds of jobs that exist in our economy. That’s why college-going, school reform, and the jobs pipeline concept are so important,” DeStefano said, referring to both the rise of New Haven’s biomedical sector and to various policy initiatives his administration is focusing on. ​“Just because [new jobs] are located here doesn’t mean they’re [going to] New Haveners. As long as we have this division of housing stock, we will tend to attract lower-skilled entry level talent. We have to increase that talent pool.”

Alexion is a big get for the city, and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who dangled $51 million in state aid to make the company one of his ​“First Five” firms. It’s also bolstering hopes that New Haven, and the state, could snag a sizable piece of the booming biomedical industry, patterning itself after cutting-edge hubs like the Research Triangle area around Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, N.C.

Christine Broadbridge (pictured at the top of the story), chair of the physics department at Southern Connecticut State University and an advocate for hands-on science training in education, said Alexion’s move shows companies are starting to read the cues given by the state.

“I think it’s hugely important, because they’re growing and they decided to stay here. That to me is a statement,” she said. ​“It’s also a buildup of manufacturing, but a different type of manufacturing. I think we’re looking at other states and kind of moving forward with this sort of Research Triangle concept.”

With the planned new campus for Maine-based Jackson Laboratory, which is slated to build a genomics laboratory in Farmington, the state is raising its profile. 

Selling Hope: What They Make

Alexion’s potential extends beyond economic development. What the company is really selling is hope, especially for people with unusual conditions.

Several of those diseases have no real treatment now. Alexion’s work could change that.

Alexion’s Soliris is the first treatment known as a ​“terminal complement inhibitor.” It’s approved in the U.S. as a treatment for two diseases: paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria and atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome.

With PNH, the disease described at the top of the story, uncontrolled activation of the complement system attacks red blood cells.

The second disease, known as aHUS, causes blood clots in the body’s tiniest blood vessels, leading to severe tissue damage in organs like the kidneys. More than half of the patients with the disorder die or start kidney dialysis within the first year after diagnosis.

The complement system is a component of the immune system. When things work normally, the complement system seeks and destroys foreign bodies, such as bacteria. But when the system becomes overactive, it can wreak havoc.

The system is a series of about 20 proteins that are activated in sequence, according to Irving Adler, an Alexion spokesman. Things go awry after about the fifth protein, he said, a process that’s known as terminal complement.

For PNH, Soliris stops the runaway train, binding to the fifth protein so that it can’t split and then destroy healthy tissues, Adler said. By inhibiting the terminal complement process, the treatment effectively stops the disease.

“Soliris is 100 percent effective in blocking terminal complement,” Adler said. ​“There have just been dramatic results.”

Many aHUS patients are able to stop dialysis, he said; PMH patients might have a normal lifespan, instead of facing a high risk of an early death.

There is a major risk associated with Soliris: meningococcal infection, which can cause meningitis or sepsis, a major blood infection. The prescribing information for the drug includes a warning that patients be vaccinated before beginning treatment.

Soliris also comes with a big price tag — a year’s worth of treatment costs about $400,000, making it one of the most expensive drugs in the world, according to Forbes.com.

Building On Success

Adler said Alexion’s leaders hope to use terminal complement inhibitors to treat a range of other diseases. One potential treatment is to help kidney transplant patients whose new organs are imperiled by immune attack via the complement system. Another is for myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disorder that affects the muscles and nerves.

The company is exploring many other applications, Adler said, including inhibitors that are different from Soliris.

“Our main focus is the entire field of severe, ultra-rare and severe life-threatening diseases,” he said.

What does ​“ultra-rare” mean? Adler said it’s generally defined as a condition affecting fewer than 20 people out of every million, or about 6,000 in the U.S. Some of these diseases affect even fewer people, he said.

That does drive up the price of treatments — there’s no competition, and small patient pools mean less ability to spread the cost of developing a new drug — but it is also a nice market niche for the company.

Building The Stable

Alexion’s future as a business largely depends on building its stable of drugs. In February, the company bought a Canadian company, Enobia Pharma, to develop asfotase alfa. That’s an enzyme-replacement therapy that has shown promise in clinical trials treating hypophosphatasia, which softens bones and weakens muscles, usually in infancy. It may also be useful for some inflammatory disorders.

The company’s efforts to broaden the use of terminal complement inhibitors, as well as the development of the acquired treatment, has drawn raves from investment analysts. A report by John Sonnier, an analyst at William Blair & Company, an investment banking firm, estimates that Alexion’s sales will reach $1 billion this year. The company’s shares closed at more than $95 on Friday.

But there are risks, the report says. Poor results in current or future clinical trials could hurt Alexion’s stock price, as could anything that stalls the company’s progress in bringing drugs besides Soliris on to the market. So could a pricing crackdown that limits the ability of companies to charge high prices for these types of ​“ultra-orphan” drugs, named because they treat conditions that have been previously neglected.

A Joint In The Jobs Pipeline?

More immediately, the question is the company’s New Haven profile. Will it be just a major tenant, building the tax base? Or can it also be a local jobs generator?

Board of Aldermen President Jorge Perez came away somewhat optimistic after he and other local legislative leaders toured Alexion’s Cheshire plant Tuesday.

He saw administrative assistants, lab tech assistants, and plenty of other workers doing jobs that he believes New Haveners can fill as the company expands at Downtown Crossing.

“It should be a win,” Perez said. ​“It’s up to us now to make sure we do what we need to do to increase the chances that New Haven residents will benefit from it.”

He also predicted that Alexion’s arrival will spin off plenty of other jobs at businesses from tech suppliers to service companies.

Alexion’s Adler said it’s too soon to break down the promised new job growth into categories, but said the company’s home here will host ​“a broad range of functions,” including research, commercial operations and general administration.

“As we continue to build our headquarters function, which includes our research ventures and a significant portion of our commercial team, as well as the global administration of the company, we will be building similar [new] positions, with a very broad range of skills,” he said.

That’s exciting news for people like SCSU’s Broadbridge who are working to strengthen the area’s workforce development options.

Southern is bolstering its science offerings, aiming to get students excited about a panoply of subjects and steer them into science-based careers, either through advanced degrees or programs that train them to work in laboratories.

Southern is the home base for the state university system’s nanotechnology center, and has worked to foster a culture of collaboration with industry and other academic centers, including Yale.

It makes sense that Alexion would choose to come to New Haven, close to Yale and its medical complex, Broadbridge said. Other successful research centers have that connection, too: Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, for Silicon Valley; Duke University and the University of North Carolina in the Research Triangle; MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass.

Alexion’s presence in New Haven will give students in the area a place to get internships and exposure to industry research, she said. It also sends a powerful signal to younger kids about the career opportunities in science.

“As I’m starting to tell kids in New Haven, ​‘You need to be thinking engineering,’ now I can say to them, ​‘This is a place where you could get a job,’‘’ Broadbridge said.

Paul Bass contributed reporting to this story.