Order worth 121 million euros for a new production plant

Increasing local production capacity for future demand peaks

Recent­ly, Mer­ck, a sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny, announced that its Life Sci­ence busi­ness sec­tor has been award­ed a EUR 121 mil­lion con­tract to build a lat­er­al flow mem­brane man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ty over a three-year peri­od at its U.S. site in She­boy­gan, Wis­con­sin. The con­tract award by the U.S. Depart­ment of Defense (DoD) on behalf of the U.S. Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices is part of an effort to ensure a secure local sup­ply and man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty for crit­i­cal pan­dem­ic pre­pared­ness products.

“With this agree­ment, Mer­ck will estab­lish a state-of-the-art lat­er­al flow mem­brane man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ty that will pro­vide our glob­al in vit­ro diag­nos­tic (IVD) cus­tomers with greater flex­i­bil­i­ty and sup­ply secu­ri­ty for our Hi-Flow™ Plus lat­er­al flow membranes.”

- Matthias Heinzel, Mem­ber of the Exec­u­tive Board

“Our mem­branes have earned a rep­u­ta­tion for high con­sis­ten­cy among rapid diag­nos­tic man­u­fac­tur­ers, and the already robust glob­al demand for these mem­branes has increased sig­nif­i­cant­ly since the pan­dem­ic out­break. With this crit­i­cal invest­ment, we are expand­ing much-need­ed access to impor­tant diag­nos­tic tests as a trust­ed part­ner to the world’s most demand­ing diag­nos­tic man­u­fac­tur­ers,” said Jean-Charles Wirth, Head of Applied Solu­tions, Life Science.

The con­struc­tion of this new facil­i­ty sup­ports the com­pa­ny’s over­all life sci­ence strat­e­gy to expand its phys­i­cal capa­bil­i­ties and build out its region­al net­work to enable fur­ther growth of its key portfolios.

The mem­brane is used by cus­tomers for the pro­duc­tion of rapid test kits and enables repro­ducible results due to its con­sis­tent qual­i­ty and opti­mized prop­er­ties. The rapid test kits are used for a vari­ety of appli­ca­tions includ­ing infec­tious dis­ease test­ing (Covid-19, HIV, influen­za, malar­ia, etc.) as well as in wom­en’s health, bio­mark­er detec­tion, drug test­ing, food safe­ty and ani­mal health.

Due to the con­tin­u­ous increase in demand for lat­er­al flow mem­branes, the com­pa­ny has already invest­ed in a sec­ond mem­brane cast­ing facil­i­ty in Cork, Ire­land, which was recent­ly com­plet­ed, and expand­ed the range of oth­er key reagents (anti­bod­ies, beads, block­ers, buffers) used to devel­op rapid lat­er­al flow test kits. These strate­gic invest­ments posi­tion the Group as a key sup­pli­er of crit­i­cal raw mate­ri­als to the diag­nos­tics mar­ket, par­tic­u­lar­ly as it pre­pares for IVD and med­ical device regulations.

The Life Sci­ence busi­ness is under­tak­ing an ambi­tious mul­ti-year pro­gram to increase pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty and capa­bil­i­ties to meet grow­ing glob­al demand for life-sav­ing vac­cines, ther­a­pies and diag­nos­tics. Over the past year, the com­pa­ny has accel­er­at­ed invest­ments in expand­ing pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty for Mobius® sin­gle-use sys­tems in the U.S. and France, and increased cell cul­ture media man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty in the U.S. and U.K., among oth­er coun­tries. In addi­tion, sev­er­al expan­sion projects con­tin­ue to be advanced through­out the com­pa­ny’s glob­al pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion network.