Emisphere: Jersey move will save us $1M

By JOHN GOLDEN

The biopharmaceutical company Emisphere Technologies Inc. announced Wednesday it will move its corporate headquarters and about 25 employees from The Landmark at Eastview to Cedar Knolls, N.J. The move will begin this month and is expected to be completed by the first quarter of 2008.

The company will keep its scientific staff of about 75 in its laboratory and research and development facilities at the biotech office park on Old Saw Mill River Road at Tarrytown, where it has been a tenant for 10 years.

"This move allows us to better serve all of our customers and enhance collaborations with leading pharmaceutical companies," said Michael V. Novinski, Emisphere president and CEO. "The move will keep Emisphere agile and competitive for our partners and be particularly advantageous as we take the company in new and exciting directions."

Emisphere spokesman Bob Madison said the move will save the company $1 million annually, “based on collapsing some of the space here (at the Landmark), subletting some of the space and with the incentives” in the form of tax breaks and credits offered by the state of New Jersey to biotech research and development companies.

Madison said the company’s new headquarters at 240 Cedar Knolls Road “is right in the center of a cluster of potential partners and existing partners” among pharmaceutical companies, “and makes us more accessible for collaboration. It allows us to better serve our customers.”

One of Emisphere’s largest collaborators, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis Pharma AG, paid the company about $5.25 million in 2006 for use of its technology in clinical drug-product trails. Novartis has a production facility in Suffern in Rockland County. Another major collaborator, Hoffman-LaRoche Inc., the U.S. prescription drug unit of the Roche Group of Switzerland, is based in Nutley, N.J.

“We realize that a lot of the key talent for research and development in science is here in the Hudson Valley, so we’ll keep the laboratory here,” the spokesman said.

The company’s lease in Westchester County with BioMed Realty expires in 2012, with a five-year extension option, Madison said. The company leases approximately 86,000 square feet at The Landmark, of which 6,800 square feet reportedly will be vacated in the move to New Jersey.

A publicly traded company, Emisphere Technologies specializes in using its registered technology in the oral delivery of therapeutic molecules and pharmaceutical compounds that cannot currently be delivered by oral means or have low oral absorption. That eligen technology makes it possible to deliver a therapeutic molecule without altering its chemical form or biological integrity.

The company reported an operating loss of approximately $27 million in 2006. Emisphere officials in their annual report to shareholders said they anticipated continued significant operating losses and said the business would require substantial additional investment not yet secured.

Novinski, former president of Organon USA Inc., took over as president and CEO in May.

 

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