Pfizer has announced the opening of a new 280,000-square-foot R&D hub in Cambridge, Mass. The new Pfizer facilities in Kendall Square bring together 1,000 colleagues from three area locations and positions Pfizer in closer proximity to leading academic institutions, hospitals and patient organizations.

“Our new Kendall Square presence in Cambridge represents an important milestone in Pfizer’s approach to creating a sustainable R&D engine designed to yield a flow of innovative therapies year after year,” said Mikael Dolsten, M.D., Ph.D., president of worldwide R&D at Pfizer. “Having all of our Cambridge-area researchers working closely together in one of the world’s most exciting biomedical ecosystems will allow us to continue our efforts to grow our external collaborations and has the potential to help speed the translation of scientific knowledge into potential medical breakthroughs across areas of unmet need such as lupus, inflammatory bowel disease, kidney disease, type 2 diabetes, muscular dystrophy and Parkinson's disease.”

Led by José-Carlos Gutiérrez-Ramos, Ph.D., Pfizer group vice president of biotherapeutics R&D, the new laboratory facilities are leased from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Pfizer scientists will work in state-of-the-art lab space on a range of clinical programs across several therapeutic areas, including inflammation, immunology, rare disease, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases and neuroscience.

L. Rafael Reif, Ph.D., MIT president, said, “MIT and Pfizer have established a tradition of working together to advance science, research and education, through strategic initiatives like MIT’s Synthetic Biology Center. With this extraordinary core of Pfizer research teams now right next door to our labs at MIT, we can capitalize on the power of proximity to speed progress towards solutions to urgent challenges in human health.”

In addition to the new Cambridge R&D hub, Massachusetts is home to Pfizer’s research and manufacturing site in Andover and is the global headquarters for Pfizer’s Centers for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI) in Boston. By establishing collaborations with institutions working on novel and cutting-edge research, CTI’s model is designed to build an innovative network for drug discovery, with the goal of bringing new, targeted therapies to patients quickly.