Jul 18, 2022 Cytiva scoops up former Bayer plant in Michigan as part of $1.5B expansion push

Cytiva Michigan
With the acquisition of a former Bayer site in Muskegon, Michigan, rapidly-growing Cytiva will have four manufacturing facilities in the U.S. (Cytiva)

Still flying high on a $1.5 billion investment from its parent company, the Danaher Group, Cytiva has acquired a facility in Muskegon, Mich., which it will transform into a manufacturing site for chromatography resins.

It will be Massachusetts-based Cytiva’s fourth plant in the United States, in addition to seven in Europe. It also will become Cytiva’s first factory outside of Sweden to make the resins, which are used in the purification and analysis of biomolecules to produce a variety of medicines.     

The plant was purchased from German multinational chemical company BASF, which announced its closure in October of 2020 to consolidate operations. The factory was established in 1975 and formerly produced herbicides for Bayer.

Cytiva said it will employ 200 at the facility, which will include 168,000 square feet of floor space. Under BASF, the site had 16 buildings over its 387 acres. Construction will begin in this quarter with manufacturing expected to start in 2026, the company said.

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Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed. Cytiva said that Michigan helped fund the move along with the U.S. government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). Contract support also will come from the U.S. Army and the Department of Defense’s Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense, Cytiva said.

In October of 2020, the company revealed a $31 million grant from BARDA to expand manufacturing capacity at its site in Marlborough, Mass. and to build a duplicate structure at its facility in Logan, Utah, where it plans to add close to 400 employees over the next decade.

Cytiva has been growing rapidly since it was acquired by Danaher in 2019 for $21.4 billion.

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Two months ago, Cytiva opened an 80,000 square foot facility in Grens, Switzerland, which will house 250 employees and quadruple the company’s capacity to produce its single-use cell and gene therapy manufacturing kits.

In March of this year, Cytiva opened a 250-employee factory in Wales to produce mixer bags, flow kits and tubing assemblies to support vaccine manufacturing. A similar $52.5 million factory is in the works in South Korea, the company said last year.

(FROM fiercepharma)