Integral automation: Investment in automation is crucial, notes GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare completes a strategic minority investment and fills a space in its cell therapy production with an acquisition.
Automation is an integral part of biopharmaceutical production, playing a central role in manufacturing coordination, control and documentation and replacing many manual operations. Not only do processes need to be flexible regarding the size of batches but also must comply with strict regulatory guidelines while also keeping costs down. Therefore, automating hardware alone is not sufficient in today’s market.
As a result of this demand GE Healthcare Life Sciences has completed a strategic minority investment of technology company, Zenith Technologies, which delivers manufacturing software systems to global life sciences companies. This enhancement to the existing partnership will see Zenith’s automation expertise being applied to GE Healthcare’s consumer base and will also increase automation capabilities for product development.
“Zenith has grown significantly over the last number of years and now has over 700 people globally. Zenith are engaged with the top 10 life science companies and we are looking forward to continuing to work with GE Healthcare and the next-generation of manufacturing solutions,” said Brendan O'Regan, Executive Chairman and Founder, Zenith Technologies. “This investment by GE will further enhance our recent partnership and collaboration, and will enable an acceleration of growth for Zenith.”
“In a complex and highly regulated industry, automation is critical for our customers, who want to establish biomanufacturing capacity quickly and at a lower cost. This is often in challenging markets, where the access to life-saving therapies is limited,” added Jan Makela, General Manager, Bioprocess, GE Healthcare Life Sciences. “With many years of experience in a wide diversity of customer applications, Zenith Technologies can strengthen our end-to-end solutions even further. This is a significant strategic investment by GE and the next step in developing our market-changing FlexFactory and KUBio manufacturing solutions.”
Filling the cell therapy space
Additionally, GE Healthcare has acquired a specialist in cryochain technology for sensitive cellular therapies, Asymptote. This acquisition will fill the space in GE Healthcare’s end-to-end ecosystem of products and services for cell therapy production.
Cellular therapies are fast becoming a revolutionary aspect of the healthcare landscape as a result of the potential they offer in treatments and cures for challenging conditions. As this market develops so will the demand for manufacturing and clinical delivery of cellular therapeutic solutions.
“Asymptote’s high-quality offering takes us another step forward in our vision to industrialize cell therapy, and in providing reliable and high-quality services for our customers and patients around the world,” explained Ger Brophy, general manager of GE Healthcare’s Cell Therapy business. “We want to improve the access to cellular therapies and tap the great potential that they have in curing some of our most difficult diseases. Finding ambitious technologies and partners like Asymptote, we are one step closer to realizing that goal.”
This acquisition further increases GE Healthcare’s investments in cell therapy and regenerative medicine. Over the past 12 months the company has also acquired Biosafe — a supplier of integrated cell bioprocessing systems — Virtuvian Networks — a GE Ventures and Mayo Clinic collaboration, providing cloud-based software systems and manufacturing services for cell and gene therapies — and BirdGE@ CCRM Cell Therapy Centre of Excellence — a US and Canadian government co-investment project to promote new technologies in cellular therapies production in Toronto.