To address increased demand for bioprocessing assemblies, Entegris will invest $30 million to expand three manufacturing facilities.
The material and process solutions firm Entegris will expand three of its life sciences manufacturing sites located in Billerica; Massachusetts, Bloomington; Minnesota, and Logan; Utah.
“This expansion is in response to the increased pharmaceutical demand for single use high purity bulk systems, especially the ones for freezing, transporting, storing, and thawing drug substances. And obviously, there’s a big challenge for the COVID-19 vaccines,†John Lynch, vice president of life sciences at Entegris told us.
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The facilities will be used to develop and produce bioprocessing assemblies, including Entegris’ single-use critical fluid handling product line, Aramus, which is used to manufacture and deliver vaccines.
The company expects to hire around 200 additional members of staff throughout 2021 with production and engineering experience to support the scale-up and demand for its products.
Lynch touched on the recruitment process, praising its “strong HR and recruitment team†who are “mobilizing the team quite quickly.â€
Each facility has different advantages and will leverage Entegris’ technologies and according to Lynch they have “very good capabilities for flexible configuration to meet specific customer bioprocessing needs […] as we help scale up with all the plethora of capabilities for COVID as well as non-COVID.â€
Entegris started developing solutions specific to bioprocessing needs before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Lynch said the expansion was “pretty much in the works but we just had to pull the trigger faster so that we could ramp up Aramus to the product lines, as well as some other solutions for the industry.â€
Alongside Aramus, Entegris also provides other bioprocessing solutions that aims to reduce development costs and time-to-market. This includes fluid management technologies, particle characterization, process analytics, filtration and purification, and liquid packaging.
The $30 million investment is in addition to the $10 million the firm injected into its life sciences capabilities in 2020.