Health Care Research Firm Will Move Employees to Morrisville, N.C.
Posted on: Wednesday, 11 January 2006, 21:00 CST
By Sabine Vollmer, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.
Jan. 11--The other shoe has dropped for Icoria employees.
The once-promising Triangle biotechnology company had 96 employees when it was bought in December. Now its new owners are moving about 50 of the remaining employees to new offices and labs in Morrisville, about six miles from their current home.
The move allows Clinical Data, a Newton, Mass. manufacturer of medical testing equipment, to consolidate its North Carolina health-care research. In addition to buying Icoria for $12.5 million, Clinical Data bought Genaissance Pharmaceuticals, a New Haven, Conn., company with an office in Perimeter Park in Morrisville.
By April, Genaissance and Icoria employees who will be retained for the long term will be working there under the same roof, said Mark Shooman, the company's chief financial officer.
Shooman projected the Morrisville office will employ fewer than 100, but declined to be more specific.
As part of the consolidation, Clinical Data cut jobs at Genaissance and Icoria, he said. Another 26 Icoria scientists, who continue to do agriculture research in a Miami Boulevard laboratory, are likely to lose their jobs by the end of the year, he added.
Icoria was founded in 1997 as Paradigm Genetics. Its stock began trading publicly May 5, 2000, and surged as high as $27 that fall.
In September 2000, the company moved into a custom-built, 101,000-square-foot, two-buildings headquarters in RTP. One of the buildings, measuring about 50,000 square feet, was dedicated to a greenhouse and a laboratory where scientists researched genetic information in crop seeds. But within two years, Paradigm Genetics lost steam, started to shift from an agricultural research company to a health-care research company and changed names.
In March 2005, it sold part of its agricultural research business to Monsanto, an Icoria client and crop-production giant in St. Louis. As part of the $15 million acquisition, Monsanto took over the lease for Icoria's plant research lab to establish a presence in RTP.
Clinical Data will be looking to sublease the second of Icoria's former headquarters buildings as soon as the move to Morrisville is completed, Shooman said.
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CLDA,
Source: The News & Observer
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