Growth at Enzo gives hope for LI bio-tech industry
Photo credit: Richard Slattery | President of ENZO Cinical Labs Inc., Kevin Krenitsky, M.D., on Wednesday December 16, 2009.
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Back in July, when Long Island's largest biotechnology company, OSI Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Melville, announced it was picking up stakes and moving to Westchester County, business leaders let out a collective groan: the Island's hopes of cultivating a bio-tech industry, they said, were dead.
Maybe not. Enzo Clinical Labs of Farmingdale, a division of Enzo BioChem Inc. of Manhattan, has been booming lately.
Enzo has signed two major partnership agreements since last month - one to develop and market a blood test for colorectal cancer and the other to market a test for cervical cancer protection. Enzo also has acquired four companies in the last two years and added 87 people to its workforce this year, bringing its Long Island workforce to 366.
"The company has undergone a very dramatic transformation," said company president Barry Weiner. The two marketing agreements should provide "significant dollar value" to Enzo, said Weiner, who declined to discuss specific amounts. In its most recent quarter, Enzo reported that losses narrowed on a boost in laboratory services. Enzo has about 680 employees overall.
Business leaders bemoaned the loss of OSI, which has successfully designed an anti-lung cancer drug, Tarceva. OSI, they said, was to be the anchor of a biotech industry, but the company left for what it felt was a better campus-type setting in Ardsley.
Can Enzo be that anchor? Weiner isn't sure. "One company does not make an industry," he said. But he added, the type of work Enzo does on the Island, diagnostics, is now a dynamic discipline.
"Fifteen years ago, the clinical lab industry was looked at as very mundane," Weiner said. "But today, it's viewed as the very porthole through which the whole health industry must pass."
