According to industry experts, single-use technologies are no longer the niche products they were just a few years ago and are now firmly part of the bioproduction process.
And demand for such technologies continues to shoot up, according to two of the major vendors which reported their 2016 interim results this week.
Filtration, separation and purification tech firm Pall is just shy of a year under the ownership of Danaher, and have contributed heavily to the corporation’s Life Sciences & Diagnostics division, which saw sales just over $5bn (€4.5bn) for the first six months, up 42% on the same period 2015.
Danaher’s CEO Thomas Joyce told investors the growth was “specifically around [its] single use technology product offering,” adding the firm is “seeing continued double-digit growth rates in that area, and that clearly is associated with the growth in biopharmaceutical specifically in the growth in large molecule drugs.”
“Our expanded single-use product offering has enhanced our competitive position as pharmaceutical companies look to shift from traditional large infrastructure stainless steel systems to more efficient production processes,” Joyce continued.
As a standalone company, however, the double-digit core revenue growth in Pall’s life sciences division was subdued by low single-growth within its industrial business, and the firm reported mid-single digits for the quarter compared to last year.
Sartorius
Goettingen, Germany-based Sartorius, meanwhile described its Bioprocess Solutions business – focused on single-use biomanufacturing products – to once again be the “growth engine” for the first six months.
Sales grew 24% year-on-year to €470m, while order intake stood at €519m, up 21%.
While demand was strong across all regions globally, the firm also saw non-organic growth through the full integration of recent acquisitions BioOutsource and Cellca - acquired in April and July 2015 respectively.
The firm has continued growing its technology and service offerings, and within the past month has added bioanalytics capacity through the acquisition of IntelliCyt, and a virus quantification platform with the acquisition of ViroCyt.