Thermo Fisher opens Plainville center

Thermo Fisher Scientific has opened its flagship U.S. Bioprocess Design Center in Plainville, Massachusetts, expanding the site’s role in biologics development. (businesswire.com) The company announced the opening on April 28 and said the center is designed to help customers develop and scale biologic drugs, including vaccines and cell and gene therapies. (businesswire.com) (biospace.com) The Bioprocess Design Center includes 4,000 square feet of laboratory and training space inside Thermo Fisher’s 290,000-square-foot Plainville facility. (businesswire.com) (rdworldonline.com) Bioprocessing is the step-by-step work of turning living cells into medicines at commercial scale. Thermo Fisher said the Plainville center lets customers test media, cell-line development, single-use systems, chromatography, filtration, purification and analytics in one workflow. (businesswire.com) The Plainville addition also plugs into services already on site. Thermo Fisher said the Massachusetts campus already offers integrated sterile fill-finish and viral vector capabilities, which are used to manufacture finished drug products and gene-therapy delivery tools. (businesswire.com) (biopharmaapac.com) That matters in Massachusetts because Plainville sits between Boston’s biotech cluster and Thermo Fisher’s manufacturing footprint. The company employs about 3,500 people across 10 sites in the state, according to the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center. (masslifesciences.com) The Plainville project did not start this week. In May 2020, Thermo Fisher said it would spend $180 million to build a new Plainville commercial manufacturing site that would more than double its viral vector capacity. (thermofisher.com) The company has not disclosed the investment amount for the new design center or a staffing figure tied specifically to the opening. Trade coverage said those details were not provided with the announcement. (rdworldonline.com) Thermo Fisher’s jobs site had posted Plainville roles tied to the Bio Design Center before the opening, including laboratory coordination, cell-culture science and process-development positions. (jobs.thermofisher.com 1) (jobs.thermofisher.com 2) (jobs.thermofisher.com 3) The new center makes Plainville Thermo Fisher’s U.S. anchor for a bioprocess design network that already includes sites in China, South Korea, Singapore and India. (rdworldonline.com)