Amgen plans to establish a $25 million “capability center” in Tampa, FL, that is expected to employ 450 people by next year, and support business-enabling services of the Biotech giant.
The capability center, set to start operation in October, will serve as a base for operational, analytical, staff support, and business support activities of Amgen. The 136,000-square-foot facility will occupy four floors of Corporate Center One, located at 2202 N. Westshore Blvd.
“We are a company driven by a single mission—to serve patients—and the services and activities that will happen at the Center are central to enabling this,” David W. Meline, Amgen executive vice president and CFO, said in a statement.
The public-private Tampa Hillsborough Economic Development Corporation (EDC), which announced the planned facility yesterday, said Tampa was chosen from a short list of finalist sites that emerged from an “exhaustive evaluation” of potential locations by Amgen.
“Their selection of Tampa and Hillsborough County is a great point of pride and a testament to the hard work begun years ago to recruit globally renowned life science industry companies to this community,” Ken Atwater, Ph.D., chairman of the Tampa Hillsborough EDC and president of Hillsborough Community College, said in a statement. “Just as Bristol-Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson [J&J] have found Tampa to be a perfect fit for their organizations, we expect Amgen will enjoy great success here as well.”
In October, J&J opened an 88,500-square-foot global services delivery center in Tampa for its finance, operations, information technology, procurement, and human resources functions. The center opened with 240 employees, a staff that is expected to expand to 500 people by 2020.
And in January 2014, Tampa was where BMS opened its North American capability center, a 140,000-square-foot facility whose 579 jobs are focused on information technology, marketing services, business and finance services, and other functions that support the Pharma giant’s U.S. biopharma business.
According to the EDC, a key factor in BMS, J&J, and Amgen opening support facilities in Tampa is the presence of the University of South Florida College of Medicine and the H. Lee Moffitt Center and Research Institute.
