Around 175 employees who make drugs such as Viagra and Reactine at a Pfizer pharmaceutical plant in Arnprior, Ont., will get to keep their jobs after a Nova Scotia company bought the facility, complete with its inventory and employees.

Keata Pharma, Inc. will manufacture Pfizer products at the factory about 55 kilometres west of Ottawa for the next three years as part of the agreement announced in a news release Wednesday.

New-York based Pfizer, which bills itself as the world's largest research-based biomedical and pharmaceutical company, had planned to sell or close the Arnprior factory by the end of 2008.

Keata, which is based in Cape Breton Regional Municipality but has a plant in Perth, Ont., about 60 kilometres south of Arnprior, said it also plans to manufacture products for two other "major pharmaceutical clients" under multi-year contracts at the Arnprior site.

The company is a subsidiary of Pharmeng International Inc., a Toronto-based company whose shares trade on the TSX Venture Exchange.

Pfizer announced in August that it would stop running the Arnprior plant, which employed around 195 people. At the time, it was reducing the number of facilities it operated from 93 to 62.

The company said in a news release that it hoped to sell the plant to a company that wanted to continue running, but would eliminate 175 positions if it could not. The remaining 20 positions were to move to other Canadian Pfizer facilities regardless of whether the Arnprior factory was sold.