West Cork pharmaceutical facility competing on a worldwide scale
O’Dowd, 41, is technical director of the Merck Sharpe Dohme (MSD) facility at Brinny near Innishannon and takes pride in the fact that in the last three decades the plant has grown from a simple drug-making factory to become a centre of excellence, on a par with any worldwide.
The company manufactures and/or packages many of its leading products for the world market in Ireland, with 61% of MSD’s top 20 products made here.
Brinny is central to that success. “I am director of technical operations at the site,” says O’Dowd, explaining that it is no cliche to describe Brinny’s new technical operations department as state of the art.
“It is a fantastic facility and allows us to bring new products as well as develop existing ones. We are not just manufacturing commercial products but also doing clinical work, both analytical and development. Brinny has been transformed in the past few years from being purely about production.”
O’Dowd has been with MSD since 1993 when he started as an intern from the University of Limerick. After winning a year-long scholarship with Merck, he returned to Cork in 1994 and has been at Brinny ever since.
He will be celebrating the company’s 30th anniversary today with his wife
Martina, daughter Fay, 8, and sons Charlie, 6, and 3-year-old Jack at a family day on site.
“There is no such thing as a typical day,” he says. “You have to react quickly to events in the business we are in which makes it a very exciting place to be.”
Reacting to events has its downside, as Brinny workers discovered a year ago when 90 were made redundant. MSD, which employs 2,300 at sites in Carlow, Cork, Dublin, Tipperary, and Wicklow, was forced to scale back production at Brinny after a global review found it already had enough quantities of the drug Interferon to meet demand, and said it would also be scaling back the production of its hepatitis C drug.
That was not a pleasant experience for plant manager Matt Corcoran, any more than the staff affected, but he now believes Brinny has a brighter future.
“The industry worldwide is going through a lot of changes and Brinny is a place in transformation. Brinny started doing manufacturing only, but now we are involved in commercialisation as well as product development, and we are continuing to become more and more efficient.”
That process, he acknowledges, may not mean more jobs any time soon but will make more secure the 420 already there. “Investment in technology and adaptation by people means we can do more with less. This will allow us take on extra work while maintaining costs.”
Brinny may be a tiny cog in a very big wheel — Merck employs 86,000 globally — so it has to remain competitive, both internally and externally.
The mission of the Brinny factory is “to be a globally competitive BioPharma site with proven capability, excellence in compliance, and flawlessly supplying products that meet customers’ expectations”.
The site is on target for the ambitious global Target 15 initiative (to have the capacity to supply its products to 80% of the world) through measures including successfully reducing product unit cost. But research is also essential, says Corcoran.
“Research is the key to the development of new products. We do a lot of work here in terms of development. We do the ‘D’ side of R&D. We have a development lab with about 40 people working on new products as well as work for biological products in general.”
Brinny’s Biossay centre of excellence — which tests the effects of substances on a living organism — is the key to developing new products and improving existing ones. That’s where Fergal O’Dowd comes in. “We don’t make cigarettes. We are making medicine that saves lives. We sometimes have patients call in to us and tell us how much our product has helped them. That’s the kind of thing that makes you get up in the morning,” he says.
A global healthcare leader operating in 140 countries.
Delivers medicines, vaccines, biologic therapies, and animal health products.
Employs more than 2,300 people at sites in Dublin, Carlow, Cork, Tipperary and Wicklow.
Manufacturing network of five plants in Ireland.
Has invested over €2.2bn in Ireland over the last five decades.
