Dive Brief:
- Merck KGaA, based in Darmstadt, Germany, is building a new life science location in Burlington, MA, to expand the presence of its subsidiary MilliporeSigma in the state. MilliporeSigma, the life science arm of Merck KGaA, announced the construction plans on Tuesday.
- MilliporeSigma already has a site in Billerica, MA, with 850 employees—all of whom will be moving to Burlington. The company also has 65 manufacturing sites worldwide and 19,000 employees in 66 countries.
- The new facility will cost $115,000 and measure 280,000 square feet, with the option to add an extra 70,000 square feet. The target completion date is mid-2017.
Dive Insight:
Merck KGaA is ramping up its collaboration capacities in a big way—and Massachusetts is the perfect place to be when it comes to creating a thriving life science hub.
To that end, the new MilliporeSigma facility will house the M Lab Collaboration Center, one of the company's nine new centers to be built throughout the world. Other centers will be located in Brazil, China, France, India, Singapore and South Korea. The new center will facilitate collaboration between scientists and engineers, while also providing a non-GMP environment for hands-on training, customer experiments and troubleshooting to take place, according to the press release.
"This new and more expansive MilliporeSigma campus gives us a unique, multi-use life science hub in the United States—one that provides our employees and customers with a sustainable and collaborative working environment," said Udit Batra, CEO of MilliporeSigma and Executive Board Member of Merck KGaA.
Like other major biopharmaceutical companies, Merck KGaA is looking to fill its pipelines with new candidates. And Millipore Sigma is leveraging its longstanding presence in Massachusetts, one of the premier life sciences states in the U.S., as a springboard to develop its own collaboration hub.