Alexander Soule | Jan. 19, 2022Updated: Jan. 20, 2022 4:30 p.m.
MannKind, Connecticut’s second-largest pharmaceutical firm, now officially calls Danbury home. Alexander Soule / Hearst Connecticut Media
DANBURY — On the heels of heralded headquarters moves from New York to Stamford, Connecticut has another transplant — this time in Danbury, though municipal officials are already familiar with the corporation that now calls the city home.
MannKind is now designating Danbury as principal executive office in filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, with the company having long operated an insulin packaging plant there.
Last week, CEO Michael Castagna confirmed the company now regards Danbury as its headquarters during a virtual conference sponsored by investment bank H.C. Wainwright.
A spokesperson said Wednesday the company made the decision considering a major expansion under way at its Danbury plant and the facility’s “increasing strategic importance” to the company. The company did not provide immediate comment on whether executives will be moving cross-country to Danbury.
Inventor and entrepreneur Alfred Mann founded MannKind in the Los Angeles area, and stepped down as CEO in 2015, a year before his death at age 90. MannKind’s office is in Westlake Village at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains.
The company’s Danbury campus on Casper Street is tucked into a neighborhood with a tight mix of residences and industrial businesses, and a view of Wooster Mountain in the distance. MannKind acquired its Danbury plant in 2001, 10 years after Mann launched the company to produce inhalers that deliver drugs to treat diabetes and other ailments.
In September, MannKind sold its Danbury facility in a $102 million transaction while keeping its operations in place via a lease-back arrangement.
Under Castagna, MannKind is focusing both on endocrine diseases like diabetes as well as what it calls “orphan lung” disorders.
With physicians having issued more than 125,000 prescriptions for the diabetes treatment Afrezza between 2015 and 2020, MannKind is now hoping to win Food & Drug Administration approval for an “indication expansion” of Afrezza into the pediatrics market.
The company is also ramping up production in Danbury of Tyvaso DPI to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in hopes of gaining FDA approval, under a licensing deal with United Therapeutics.
“We’ve never been in a stronger position,” Castagna said during last week’s H.C. Wainwright conference. “What we expect in the next half of the decade of the 2020s is to start launching one new indication of one product a year.”
On the Ridgefield-Danbury line, Boehringer Ingelheim is developing COPD treatments as well. The company is the second-largest pharmaceutical employer in Connecticut after Pfizer in Groton.
FuelCell Energy and Nuvance Health are the closest major headquarters offices to MannKind’s facility flanking both sides of Casper Street along the Still River. The city’s list of corporate employers include the industrial gas manufacturer Linde, the furnishings retailer Ethan Allen Interiors, and IQVIA.
One of the life sciences industry’s larger employers managing clinical trials and analyzing data, IQVIA dropped Danbury as a dual headquarters address from SEC filings in the spring of 2021, in favor of Research Triangle Park, N.C.
An IQVIA spokesperson indicated the decision was based on the larger employee population in North Carolina, with the company maintaining a corporate office at Lee Farm Corporate Park on Wooster Heights Road.
Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman
