Couple previously gave $30 million to pharmacy school
Nephron Pharmaceuticals Corporation will bring hundreds of new jobs to Lexington County.
The announcement, which featured Gov. Nikki Haley, was made on the Horseshoe Friday morning. It represents a $313 million investment by the Orlando-based respiratory medication manufacturer that will bring 707 jobs and a 250,000 square foot facility to the area.
With it, the new factory appears to be another tie between Nephron’s owners, Bill and Lou Kennedy, and the university’s College of Pharmacy.
The two announced last September that they would donate $30 million, the largest donation in the College’s history, to establish the Kennedy Pharmacy Innovation Center, and officials on Friday emphasized the impact the new jobs would have on pharmacy graduates.
“They could have gone anywhere ... but what they did is they said ‘where are we going to do the most good?,’” Haley said. “And what they really wanted to do was help the students at the School of Pharmacy at USC, because they wanted to make sure that when these students came out, they had good jobs.”
Joseph DiPiro, executive dean of the South Carolina College of Pharmacy, speculated however, that the jobs would not be the most significant impact of the new factory for pharmacy students.
“My guess is that there will be a few pharmacists involved in their hiring plans, but they really look at professionals in a lot of different fields,” including engineers, marketers, salespeople and line workers, he said.
The real impact for the pharmacy college, he suggested, came from training opportunities for students with Nephron.
“We will be able to have more students train with them,” DiPiro added. “Right now, we’re sending students from USC down to their main facility in Orlando to spend a month. So this year, for example, five or six students will train there ... and we’ll be able to have more students (train), so for us it’s a valuable training site.”
The plant will take about two years to construct, Bill Kennedy told reporters, and hiring will begin in about a year and a half. The company won’t begin manufacturing medication, he added, for about two and a half to three years, as the plant must undergo a U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval process.
Once it opens its doors, the facility will represent a major output increase for Nephron. Its Orlando plant produced a company-high one billion units last year, but that number is set to increase.
“It’s going to be probably two or three times more productive (than the Orlando facility),” Nephron CEO Lou Kennedy said, referring to the Cayce plant.
Nephron is set to receive state job creation tax credits, and the state Commerce Department has set aside a $4.5 million grant to prepare the Saxe Gotha site and its infrastructure — incentives Governor Haley was careful to emphasize resembled those offered other incoming manufacturers.
“They were infrastructure incentives,” she explained. “It’s no different from what Continental Tire, Bridgestone or anybody else got.”