We are a leading global provider of products and services for a wide range of customers, including research labs, biotech and pharmaceutical companies, diagnostic labs, and the industrial sector.
Across our Life Science business sector, we collaborate with the global scientific community to deliver innovations and to this end, we offer a broad and deep product portfolio as well as global Contract Testing Development Manufacturing Organization (CTDMO) services ranging from process development to commercialization. In 2023, we continued to execute our strategy as a diversified life science company to strengthen our three business units, Process Solutions, Life Science Services, and Science & Lab Solutions. Our R&D teams in the three business units have launched more than 8,500 products to respond to growth trends, including those launched through our “faucet program” for antibodies, reference materials and nanomaterials.
In 2023, Life Science generated 44% of Group sales and 45% of EBITDA pre (excluding Corporate and Other). In recent years, we have steadily expanded our presence in growth markets. Europe and North America generated 70% of Life Science’s sales in 2023; Asia-Pacific and Latin America accounted for 29% of sales.
Process Solutions
The Process Solutions business unit continued to focus on delivering its product offering for the pharmaceutical development and manufacture of filtration devices, chromatography resins, single-use assemblies and systems, processing chemicals, and excipients.
Life Science Services
The Life Science Services business unit offers traditional and novel modalities, including monoclonal antibodies, high-potency active pharmaceutical ingredients (HPAPIs) and antibody-drug conjugates as well as viral and gene therapies, including mRNA. In addition to manufacturing, Life Science Services includes sales and marketing, research and development and supply chain operations. Our integrated CTDMO services support clients from preclinical phases to commercial production.
Science & Lab Solutions
The Science & Lab Solutions business unit serves customers in the pharmaceutical, biotech industries and other industries in production, testing and research, as well as public authorities and research institutions. We provide customers with access to a broad portfolio including reagents, consumables, devices, instruments, software, and services for scientific discovery in addition to lab water instruments, consumables and services, microbiology and biomonitoring products, test assays, analytical reagents, and flow cytometry kits and instruments.
In March, we opened a lateral flow assay development lab in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, an innovative space where customers collaborate with our technical experts to troubleshoot point-of-care testing.
Investments to expand capabilities and production
- We have started building a new € 30 million expansion in Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA, which will join the existing facility to create a two-building “distribution campus”.
- In May, we announced an investment of € 35 million in biosafety testing facilities at our Glasgow and Stirling sites in Scotland. Biosafety testing is a step in the drug development and manufacturing process to ensure that drugs are safe, effective and compliant with regulatory requirements. Through the expansion, we plan to create nearly 500 new jobs, bringing our Life Science workforce to over 1,200 employees across the two sites.
- The investment includes a new facility in Glasgow, which will house molecular biology and sequencing services. Testing capacity in current buildings will be expanded to include biosafety testing, analytical development and viral clearance suites. The latest investment follows our recent testing expansions in Rockville, Maryland, USA, and Shanghai, China. With its BioReliance® testing services portfolio, Life Science performs more than 20,000 studies annually in the United Kingdom for more than 400 customers globally. BioReliance® contract testing services and the recently formed Millipore® CTDMO Services are part of the Life Science Services business unit.
- Also in May, we signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with the Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and Daejeon City, Korea, for a new Asia-Pacific bioprocessing center aimed at supporting the region’s healthcare ecosystem. The planned bioprocessing facility would support commercial manufacturing for biotech and pharmaceutical customers in this region.
- In June, we announced the expansion of production capacity for highly purified reagents at the site in Nantong, China, a major transportation hub in the Yangtze River Delta region. The approximate € 70 million investment will enable large-scale manufacturing of high-purity reagents for quality control and testing for biopharma customers.
- In July, Life Science announced a € 23 million expansion of its facility in Lenexa, Kansas, USA, adding lab space and production capacity to manufacture cell culture media. Cell culture media is used in processes as varied as vaccine manufacturing, gene therapy and monoclonal antibody manufacturing. The company’s strategic investments to expand capacity in existing production facilities in the Lenexa, Kansas, USA, and Nantong, China, sites with dry powder media manufacturing lines will increase both local and global production capacity.
- Since September, CTDMO can offer integrated services for all critical stages of mRNA development, manufacturing and commercialization, including products and testing, with the opening of two new GMP-grade mRNA drug substance manufacturing sites in Darmstadt and Hamburg, Germany. The new sites are part of the company’s ongoing € 1 billion investment to advance mRNA technologies and build its global mRNA network and capabilities in addition to key acquisitions such as AmpTec and Exelead. With this € 28 million investment, we can provide mRNA services at different scales and applications from preclinical to commercial.
- In November, we completed the second phase of our new € 29 million Biologics Testing Center in Shanghai, China, expanding our first biosafety laboratories, which we inaugurated in 2022, in this market. This expansion enables us to provide local access to a broad range of testing for cell line characterization and lot release, from preclinical development to commercialization.
Sustainable packaging solutions*
Four years after its inception in 2019, the SMASH Packaging plan has entered its next generation, called SMASH 2.0. So far, more than 100 packaging improvement projects have been completed or are underway, removing tens of thousands of metric tons of CO2 without sacrificing safety, quality, or performance. Key achievements include avoiding more than 300 metric tons of packaging and achieving a 23% reduction of expanded polystyrene (EPS), also known as Styrofoam. 72.5% of the paper-based materials sourced directly for packing and shipping products therefore aligns with the so-called zero deforestation standards.
Digitalization
In March, Life Science launched its open-source code library for Palantir Foundry on GitHub®. Our source code, “Foundry DevTools”, was published under an open-source license in collaboration with Palantir. We have been partnering with Palantir since 2017 to build our data and analytics capabilities and contribute to the digital product portfolios of our Life Science, Healthcare and Electronics business sectors. The source code is freely accessible to all Foundry developers worldwide.
* The contents of this chapter or section are voluntary and therefore not audited. However, our auditor has read the text critically.