|
Release Date: June 25 2004
Red River Pharma Grand Opening (article) - June 24, 2004 Red River Pharma, a Shreveport drug manufacturing company, celebrates its grand opening with a ribbon cutting cerremony of 24,000 square feet within the InterTech Science Park, part of the Biomedical Research Foundation of Northwest Louisiana (a CERT / NLPI institution).
From the front page of the Money & Insight section of the June 20,2004 edition of the Shreveport Times:
<Quieting the critics
Red River Pharma's start gives foundation room to talk
by Michelle Mahfoufi
Charlie Wiggins slowly turned the pages of a three-ringed binder, pausing to look at the photographs protected by a plastic covering. At least two inches thick, the binder holds dozens of pictures of busted concrete floors, drywall in various stages of completion and shiny, branching networks of duct systems waiting to be connected.
"I lived this for seven months," said Wiggins, president of the manufacturing division of Red River Pharma.
This is the transformation of a former lighting warehouse into a state-of-the-art drug manufacturing plant where up to 1,100 pounds of powder a day will be converted into a million tablets for sale nationwide.
The company celebrates its grand opening this week, about a year after it first announced it was coming to Shreveport to make "medical foods" for patients with unique nutritional requirements. The doctor-prescribed tablets provide vitamins and help regulate levels of naturally occurring substances in the blood that at higher levels can contribute to cardiovascular disease. One of those products, FolTx, was one of the 200 most-prescribed medications last year. More than 1.9 million prescriptions were written, according to an annual listing in DrugTopics.com, an online news magazine for pharmacists.
Red River Pharma's ribbon-cutting ceremony is one of celebration for the Biomedical Research Foundation, which helped the company find financing and is leasing the firm 24,000 square feet within its InterTech Science Park. The inner-city medical campus triangle is a key initiative of Biomed in its mission to advance technology education, research and development.
But, according to some critics, Biomed has fallen short of that goal in recent years, straying from its original purpose to promote research funding for the LSU School of Medicine. Instead, it sunk time and money in several prospects that failed to materialize.
But officials hope Red River Pharma quiets the opponents.
Unlike previous InterTech clients Bio-Tech Imaging and Orthoevolution, which both aimed to develop new technology, Red River Pharma already has an established client for its contractural pharmaceutical manufacturing, research and development services. Red River Pharma has begun making products for its sister company, Covington-based Pamlab, months ahead of schedule to keep up with the demand that pumped Pamlab's sales from $42 million in 2002 to $62 million by the end of last year. More than half of those sales are for the three products that will now be manufactured in Shreveport.
But Red River Pharma's business plan doesn't stop there. New products are continually in development through the research side of the firm, and company officials are constantly recruiting new business in expansion efforts. Jai Mehta, president of the company's development side, envisions partnerships with area researchers to help bring their products to commercialization.
"It's not just making Pamlab products that we want to do here," he said. "That's just the start of it."
And that can only help the area, said InterTech's executive director Dennis Lower.
"From a strategic development perspective, what it means is it becomes a basis for attracting other companies, other like companies, that would have synergy with Pamlab and Red River Pharma," he said. "The history of success as you try and try again is replete with examples of why people keep doing it. They keep doing it because you keep striking matches until they light. And when they light, they create a fire and a flame that quiets the critics."
A nostalgic attraction
Red River Pharma's roots began in Shreveport 40 years ago. Minden native and former Homer High football star Sam Camp had just graduated from Tulane. He took a job with Rucker Pharmacal, the predecessor to today's BASF Corp.
Camp set out on his own in 1972, co-founding U.A.D. Laboratories Inc. Fifteen years later he bought Pan American Laboratories and changed its name to Pamlab.
When president/COO Barry LeBlanc joined Pamlab in 1996, the company was spending almost $13 million a year out of state for product formulation and manufacturing - a no-no to the economic development group he had joined to help create biotech jobs in Louisiana.
"The first thing we said is, 'Let's go do that here.'...But there wasn't anyone who could accommodate us here. So Sam and I decided we would personally start another company in Louisiana that would perform this service for Pamlab and that as that company grew, it would provide services for others," LeBlanc said.
Red River Pharma was born. A work force with a history of pharmaceutical manufacturing locally, Biomed and a "sort of nostalgic attraction" drew Camp and LeBlanc to Shreveport.
Red River Pharma will employ the same business strategy of sales force development and expansion that is being used to grow Pamlab's sales to $100 million by Dec. 31, 2006. Sales growth comes from continuing to develop new proprietary products and convincing physicians to prescribe them. Pamlab has staff in 44 states and stocks its prescription products in all major chain pharmacies in every state.
"The core business strategy in the beginning is to channel as much Pamlab business into Red River Pharma," LeBlanc said.
Red River Pharma, which is working out of an interim manufacturing facility already at capacity until it can construct a new plant in the next three to five years, already employs about 30 people. By 2007, the company expects to have 200 or more employees, with an average salary of about $50,000 a year.
The company will occupy space in Biomed's BioSpace 1 at the corner of Kings Highway and Mansfield Road. The state- and federally funded $12 million, 60,000-square-foot wet laboratory incubator broke ground in April and is scheduled for completion next May.
Earlier this month Pamlab completed a $5 million national headquarters expansion in Covington, near New Orleans. The 40,000-square-foot expansion will house its expanded sales and marketing operations.
As clinical trials and licensing agreements come to fruition, the first beneficiary is Red River Pharma, LeBlanc said.
"How goes Pamlab, so goes Red River.">
|
