The total investment was spread across Merck’s site in Carrigtwohill, Cork, and sees the firm add a speciality membrane facility along with the chromatography media plant to its life science consumables business.
According to the firm, the membrane plant will be the location of choice for the development and manufacture of all future Merck Life Science membrane products, while the media plant will provide the site with advanced technological capabilities, becoming the main supplier for Merck’s chromatography business including the Protein A capture media ProSep.
“ProSep media has been used for more than 25 years in purification of monoclonal antibodies. The business has grown with the advent of approval of monoclonal antibody therapies within the biopharmaceutical industry,” a spokesperson from the firm told us.
“The Cork investment signifies Merck Life Science’s continued expectations for continued growth of monoclonal therapies and products like ProSep to support them.”
Merck is not the only firm to have expanded its capacity for downstream media. Protein A resin manufacturer Purolite recently announced plans for a new 100,000L facility in Wales, UK to support its media product Praesto, while GE Healthcare expanded a cell culture site in Austria to support its downstream consumables business.
“Downstream processing end users continue to push trends like process intensification, single-use and continuous processing,” Merck said.
“Downstream processing products focus on eliminating bottlenecks and improving economic. This includes high capacity incompressible protein A resins which lead to an efficient operation of continuous chromatography unit operations.”
The facilities officially opened last week.