Almac

Allen McClay founded Galen Ltd in 1968. Galen began pharmaceutical manufacturing in Craigavon in 1978, started clinical trial supply operations there in 1988, and in 1996 began API manufacturing and chemical development in Craigavon and extended its clinical trial supply business to Pennsylvania in the United States.⁠[1]

Galen floated on the stock market in 1997 as Galen Holdings Plc, which Almac describes as Northern Ireland’s first £1 billion company. In 1999 ICTI was purchased, later becoming Almac Clinical Technologies; in 2000 the clinical trial supply business of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, was acquired, and that year Galen acquired Warner Chilcott and was restructured into Galen Pharma and Galen Services. In 2001 McClay announced his retirement from Galen Holdings.⁠[1][2]

The group holding company, Almac Group Limited, was incorporated in Northern Ireland on September 20, 2001 as L&B (No 2) Limited. It was renamed Alhow Laboratories Limited on October 25, 2001 and Almac Sciences Group Limited on November 12, 2004, and has used its present name since November 18, 2005. Its registered office is Almac House in Craigavon, its registered activity is head office activities (SIC 70100), and its financial year ends on September 30.⁠[3]

On October 24, 2001, Allen McClay and Alan Armstrong were appointed directors of the company.⁠[4]

Almac gives 2002 as the year Allen McClay founded Almac Group. That year Galen Holdings PLC agreed to sell its API manufacturing and chemical development, clinical trial supply and clinical technologies businesses to Almac.⁠[1]

After resigning from the Galen group, McClay acquired four former companies that had been core parts of Galen, spending an estimated £240 million of his own money on founding Almac Group in Craigavon, which he initially ran from a Portakabin.⁠[5]

Alan Armstrong retired from Galen Holdings in 2002 and was appointed chief executive of Almac Group.⁠[6]

In 2003 Almac opened its global headquarters in Craigavon, acquired its biomarker discovery and development business, and announced the acquisition of the pharmaceutical manufacturing operations of Galen Holdings Plc.⁠[1]

Almac Diagnostic Services traces its origins to ArraDx, a company spun out of Queen’s University BelfastQueen's University BelfastQueen’s University Belfast is a research university in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It was founded in 1845 as Queen’s College Belfast, became an independent university in 1908 and is a member of the Russell Group.Open the full entry in 2002. In 2004 ArraDx was incorporated into Almac Group under the direction of Allen McClay and became Almac Diagnostic Services.⁠[7]

The same year Almac acquired a peptide and protein research facility in Elvingston, Scotland, and Allen McClay announced the purchase of Galen Ltd, the UK-based ethical pharmaceutical products sales and marketing business.⁠[1]

In 2005 Almac opened dedicated facilities for GMP formulation development and for biomarker discovery and development services.⁠[1]

In 2008 Almac committed $120 million to a new North American headquarters and set up Almac Discovery as an independent company focused on new approaches to cancer treatment.⁠[1]

In September 2009 Allen McClay set up The McClay Foundation to fund research combining industry and academic expertise into the prevention, control and cure of disease, and made the foundation a key shareholder in Almac, of which he had previously been the sole shareholder. At the time Almac had annual turnover of about £160 million and employed 2,422 people worldwide, 1,559 of them in Northern Ireland.⁠[8]

Allen McClay, Almac’s founder and chairman, died after a short illness on January 12, 2010.⁠[2]

His directorship of Almac Group Limited ended on the same day.⁠[4]

Almac’s North American headquarters opened in Souderton, Pennsylvania, in 2011.⁠[1]

In 2012 former U.S. Senator George Mitchell attended the official opening of the North American headquarters. The 240,000-square-foot facility housed more than 800 employees and added 300 jobs in the Philadelphia region; Almac then employed more than 3,000 people worldwide.⁠[9]

In 2013 Almac opened a dedicated non-GMP formulation development facility and a commercial packaging facility in Audubon, Pennsylvania; its Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore opened in 2014.⁠[1]

In 2015 Almac acquired Arran Chemical Company in Athlone, Ireland, and confirmed a £16 million investment to expand formulation and analytical development services in Loughborough, England.⁠[1]

Arran Chemical Company had been an independent, privately owned company making products for the pharmaceutical, flavour and fragrance and personal care sectors, with reactors of up to 6,300 litres and total capacity of up to 45 cubic metres. The acquisition combined Almac’s biocatalysis technology with Arran’s large-scale intermediates manufacturing.⁠[10]

In 2016 Almac opened a companion diagnostic development facility and laboratory in Durham, in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, United States.⁠[1][7]

In November 2017 Almac acquired BioClin Laboratories of Athlone, Ireland, gaining its 14,000-square-foot facility in Garrycastle; the price was not disclosed. BioClin, founded in 2002, was a contract laboratory providing analytical and data reporting services for drug development. Almac then employed about 5,000 people worldwide.⁠[11]

The same year Almac established a European campus in Dundalk, Ireland; construction of the campus was completed in 2019.⁠[1]

In 2018 Almac opened a £20 million cold chain facility at its Craigavon global headquarters, its turnover passed £500 million for the first time, and it marked 50 years in business. In 2019 it added laboratory space for analytical services in Athlone; turnover for 2018–19 rose by £85 million to £634 million.⁠[1]

Galen, the Almac Group’s pharmaceutical sales and marketing company, announced on January 8, 2020 that it had completed a “multi-million pound” acquisition of POA Pharma; the exact price was not disclosed. POA Pharma was headquartered in Sweden with offices in Denmark, Finland, Norway and the United States, and its proprietary products, classed as food for specific medical purposes, were sold in more than 40 countries; Galen had distributed POA’s metabolic products in the UK and Ireland since April 2016.⁠[12]

In 2020 Almac reached its zero-landfill target and donated £250,000 to charities worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic.⁠[1]

On November 9, 2021, Almac announced 1,000 new jobs in Northern Ireland over the next three years and a further 800 across its global operations, which would take its workforce to 8,000 across 19 sites. Its revenue for 2020 was £677.3 million, up 6 percent on the previous year.⁠[13]

In the financial year to September 2021, Almac’s turnover rose by more than 8.6 percent to £735 million and pre-tax profit by more than 27 percent to £81 million, while its global headcount grew by more than 300. It announced a £200 million global expansion plan, including £20 million to redevelop its Craigavon campus, and said it would reinvest all of its profit in the business.⁠[14]

Almac announced an investment of about $93.5 million to expand its North American headquarters in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, adding 100,000 square feet to the existing 246,000-square-foot facility and upgrading two other sites in the county, with commitments to create at least 355 jobs and retain 1,434 existing jobs within three years. The Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development offered a funding proposal including a $1.775 million Pennsylvania First grant and a $250,000 workforce development (WEDnet) grant. It was Almac’s second expansion under Governor Tom Wolf; the first was announced in November 2016.⁠[15]

In the financial year ended September 30, 2022, Almac’s revenue was £840 million, up £105 million (14.3 percent), and pre-tax profit was £97 million, up 20 percent; its global workforce reached 7,000, having grown by more than 1,000 in the previous 18 months.⁠[16]

In 2023 Almac appointed a global energy manager, joined the Science Based Targets initiative, and broke ground on a $65 million facility expansion in Montgomery County.⁠[1]

Almac announced an £80 million expansion of its Craigavon global headquarters creating more than 550 local jobs. The projects comprised a 100,000-square-foot GMP manufacturing facility for Almac Pharma Services, mainly for solid oral dose products and due to be operational from the third quarter of 2024, and a 40,000-square-foot, four-storey diagnostic development and manufacturing centre for Almac Diagnostic Services, due for completion by the first quarter of 2024, to make companion diagnostic kits at commercial scale. The projects were supported by Invest Northern IrelandInvest Northern IrelandInvest Northern Ireland (Invest NI) is Northern Ireland’s regional economic development agency, a non-departmental public body and arm’s-length body of the Department for the Economy. It was established on April 1, 2002, under the Industrial Development Act (Northern Ireland) 2002 and is headquartered in Belfast.Open the full entry.⁠[17]

In the financial year to September 30, 2023, Almac’s revenue was £958 million, up £118 million (14 percent); pre-tax profit fell 3.3 percent to £93.8 million, with a foreign exchange loss of £6.4 million compared with a £10.1 million gain the previous year. The company employed more than 7,300 people and had filled 1,200 of the 1,800 roles announced in 2021.⁠[18]

In 2024 Almac signed a virtual power purchase agreement for renewable energy, cutting its global Scope 2 emissions by 46 percent, and announced expanded commercial manufacturing, packaging and peptide production capacity.⁠[1]

In the financial year to September 30, 2024, Almac’s revenue was £1.027 billion, up £69.5 million (7 percent); pre-tax profit was £119 million, up 27 percent; it employed more than 7,700 people worldwide, and average employee numbers rose 3 percent. The company described the global capital investment programme announced in November 2021 as worth more than £400 million, with 2024 its fourth year; projects included a centre of excellence for diagnostic development and commercial manufacturing and expanded cryogenic and ultra-low-temperature clinical supply capabilities in Durham, North Carolina, and Singapore.⁠[19]

In the financial year ended September 30, 2025, Almac’s revenue was £1.1 billion, up £71.9 million (7 percent); pre-tax profit was £138.9 million, up 16 percent; and average employee numbers rose 6 percent. As of May 2026 Almac employed more than 7,900 people worldwide, having added more than 2,000 since November 2021, over half of the new roles in Northern Ireland. The company said its global capital investment programme had grown to more than £500 million and was in its fifth year, covering clinical production and distribution, commercial manufacturing and packaging, global cold-chain infrastructure, analytical services and campus improvements.⁠[20]

The company describes itself as supporting drug development with services that include research and development, diagnostic services, API manufacture, formulation development, clinical trial supply, and commercial-scale manufacture and distribution; it states that it is privately owned and has 18 facilities across Europe, North America and Asia.⁠[21]

Almac lists its operation centres by business unit: Drug Discovery (Almac Discovery), Diagnostic Services, API Services and Chemical Development, Pharmaceutical Development Services, Analytical and Solid State Services, Clinical Services, Clinical Technologies, Commercial Services, and commercial sales and marketing through Galen.⁠[22]

Almac Sciences, the API and chemical development business, was formed by the merger of QuChem and Syngal.⁠[6]

Almac Diagnostic Services gained ISO 17025 accreditation in 2005, CLIA laboratory accreditation in 2011, CAP accreditation in 2012, a New York State permit (CLEP) in 2013, ISO 13485 in 2015 and ISO 15189 in 2017.⁠[7]

Almac’s global headquarters is in Craigavon, Northern Ireland; its EU headquarters is in Dundalk, County Louth, Ireland; its US headquarters is in Souderton, Pennsylvania; and its Asia Pacific headquarters is in Singapore. Other operation centres include Belfast, Derry/Londonderry, Manchester, Edinburgh Technopole and Charnwood in the UK; Athlone in Ireland; Durham, North Carolina, and Lansdale and Audubon, Pennsylvania, in the US; Tokyo; Birkerød in Denmark; and Sprockhövel in Germany.⁠[22]

Almac Group Limited’s register of persons with significant control lists The McClay Foundation as holding 75 percent or more of the shares and voting rights with the right to appoint or remove directors, and Almac Founder Share Company Limited as having the right to appoint or remove directors. Both are companies limited by guarantee registered in Northern Ireland, with registration numbers NI070062 and NI070915 respectively.⁠[23]

Allen McClay was Almac’s founding chairman.⁠[9]

Alan Armstrong is chairman and chief executive of Almac Group. He joined Galen Research Laboratories in quality control in 1978, became quality assurance manager in 1982, joined the board of Galen Holdings Plc as chief operating officer in 1995, and was appointed OBE in 2013.⁠[6]

Other executives include chief operating officer Graeme McBurney, who joined the board in October 2022; group finance director Niall Harkin, who joined in July 2019; Stephen Barr, president and managing director of Almac Sciences and Almac Discovery; Robert Dunlop, president and managing director of Almac Clinical Services; Valarie Higgins, president and managing director of Almac Clinical Technologies; John McQuaid, president and managing director of Almac Pharma Services since 2022; and Dennise Broderick, president and managing director of Galen.⁠[6]

In its REF 2014 impact case study, Queen’s University Belfast describes Almac Diagnostics as a spin-out company based on research by Professors Harkin and Johnston, established in 2004 and then employing 85 staff; in July 2013 the Technology Strategy Board awarded Almac Diagnostics a £2.3 million grant to develop the DDRD breast cancer test for the UK market.⁠[24]

Paul Harkin, president and managing director of Almac Diagnostic Services, is a professor of molecular oncology at the Cancer Research Centre of Queen’s University Belfast.⁠[6]

The McClay Foundation established by Allen McClay has donated more than £20 million to enhance research capabilities at Queen’s University Belfast.⁠[2]

Almac: Official website: https://www.almacgroup.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[25]

X: Public account: https://x.com/AlmacGroup (opens in a new window).⁠[25]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/almac-group/ (opens in a new window).⁠[25]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/AlmacVideo (opens in a new window).⁠[25]