Millipore Corp. is boosting its disposable medical line by launching Mobius FlexReady products and transferring work from California to a new, much-larger facility in Danvers, Mass.
The Billerica, Mass.-based life sciences firm recently opened a 33,000-square-foot building next to its Danvers plant to concentrate on the disposables market.
“One thing we had to do with the changing industry is to move toward more disposables. That's become an integral part of our strategy,” Paul Chapman, vice president of downstream processing, said by telephone.
The new plant has 12,500 square feet of Class 10,000 clean room space and will replace the building in Anderson, Calif., which has a 3,000-square-foot clean room. Millipore acquired the Anderson operation in 2006 when it was known as Newport Biosystems.
As part of the expansion, Millipore said it will shutter the leased plant in Anderson, cut 52 jobs and move those operations to Danvers by May.
Chapman said the Mobius program will employ about 100 by year's end.
The newest campaign for Millipore's flexible systems was unveiled March 17 at the Interphex 2009 trade show in New York. The products will be made up of Flexware single-use filter assemblies and process-ready hardware systems optimized for clarification, media and buffer preparation, tangential flow filtration and virus filtration.
Flexibility is the key, and Chapman said more companies are turning away from stainless steel to disposable materials. Disposables also lower the risk of contamination, and reduce cleaning and validation requirements.
“We've been selling disposable assemblies — bags, tubes, mixed bags — for awhile, so it is not brand new,” he said.
But the Mobius product, which will be a whole package, is new for the company. It includes connectors, tubes and bags. Users can shorten development time, as the system can be installed, configured and validated quickly.
In February, Millipore opened an 8,000-square-foot production and training center in Singapore to support biopharmaceutical customers in Asia. In October, it added a 30,000-square-foot facility for a membrane casting manufacturing line in Cork, Ireland.