One of the world's biggest pharmaceutical and biotech research companies is to double its workforce by creating nearly 400 new jobs, it was announced yesterday.
Pharmaceutical Product Development (PPD), which resulted in a 29% rise in income to make £80m last year, said it would be creating the jobs over three years as part of a £15m expansion of its base at Strathclyde Business Park in Bellshill, Lanarkshire.
The multinational which has more than 9700 employees in 28 countries worldwide, made the decision after getting a second Regional Selective Assistance (RSA) grant in two years - taking the public purse spending on the company to £7.5m.
PPD currently employs 350 at the Bellshill base, which provides clinical medicine trials and data management services. The latest expansion is being supported by an RSA grant from the Scottish Executive of £4.5m - more than £11,500 per job.
The new jobs will be across several areas in the company, including data development, biostatistics and clinical trial management and monitoring. It received a £3m RSA grant from the executive two years earlier after an previous expansion, which resulted in 100 new jobs.
In both cases, the company said it needed to expand to keep up with demand for its drug developments services.
The rules for regional selective assistance say that a company can only receive money if it can show it would not bring the jobs otherwise.
PPD's expansion comes a fortnight after the company announced its net income for the second quarter of this year was £30.5m, up 24.6% on the same period in 2006.
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