Triangle.

• Position: REGIONAL REPORT

Holly Springs catches flu-vaccine plant

Swiss drug maker Novartis will spend $267.5 million during the next five years to build a flu-vaccine factory that will employ 350 in Holly Springs. Novartis, which employs 677 in North Carolina, plans to start recruiting workers next year. The plant is to begin production in 2011. Annual pay will average $49,900, compared with the Wake County average of $39,468. Novartis will produce vaccines from mammalian kidney cells, which will cut the time needed to produce a dose from nine to six months and allow quicker production increases during epidemics. Novartis was given $3 million from the state's One North Carolina Fund. The company also is eligible for a Job Development Investment Grant from the state worth as much as $6 million.

DURHAM -- Cree, a maker of light-emitting semiconductor chips, bought Intrinsic Semiconductor, a Dulles, Va.-based maker of silicon-carbide wafers used in semiconductors. The $46 million deal should speed development of bigger and better wafers that will help produce higher-power semiconductors and cheaper light sources for cell-phone screens, automobile interiors and other products.

RALEIGH -- Sicel Technologies received federal approval to market its wireless, implantable radiation sensor for use in prostate-cancer patients. The device measures the radiation delivered to a tumor during treatment. Two months earlier, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared the device for use in breast-cancer...