| CORP. ACTIVITY |
Of course, Co. doesn't make them all, but it turns out that, for years, its chemical division has made many of them while ensuring the quality of all the rest. Now, as one of Co.'s biggest customers--the pharmaceutical industry--intensifies its discovery effort, Co. is adding new products and boosting its range of customized services. Today Co., operates seven chemical sites, including major facilities in Fair Lawn and Bridgewater, N.J.; Loughborough, England; and Geel, Belgium. Co.'s degree of self-manufacture varies by product area. It's most modest in the dry chemicals realm, where the company generally buys in bulk, carries out quality testing, and repackages in a variety of standard and custom containers. At its Fair Lawn plant, Co. recently installed a high-purity packaging room in which it prepares U.S. Pharmacopeia-grade products and a new line of "multicompendial" reagents that meet pharmaceutical standards in most world markets. In wet chemicals, Co. produces its own line of buffer, normality, standard, and clinical solutions. It is enjoying fast growth in biotechnology products such as cell growth media; nuclease- and protease-free reagents; buffers; stains; and enzymes for various molecular biology, cell culture, and electrophoresis applications. High-volume solutions are made and bottled at the Bridgewater plant, while Fair Lawn handles smaller scale and custom work. In the solvents area, Co. operates six batch distillation vessels in Fair Lawn to refine its high-purity Optima line; raw material quality is ensured with a fleet of dedicated tank trucks. Brown says the chemical division is adding new equipment at the site for making high-purity acetonitrile, the key solvent used by biotechnology and drug companies in the production of oligonucleotides, also known as synthetic DNA. Co.'s most significant chemical manufacturing is done in the organic chemistry field. Co. recently started up a complementary small-scale organics plant in Loughborough that's targeted at the pharmaceutical industry. Although both European facilities carry out complex organic synthesis, they are not big players in the competitive pharmaceutical fine chemicals market. "There is a lot of capacity in the fine chemicals business, and people there are hungry," Instead, the business focuses on kilogram-scale synthesis for research and early clinical trials. Customers that want to scale up to larger quantities are typically supplied by Co. through third-party manufacturers. Co. is also active in the assembly of 1,000-compound combinatorial chemistry libraries, which represent special requests on a grand scale. "A customer may want a specific library of compounds but may or may not know where to get them," Co. will do sourcing and pricing, then follow through with logistics, packaging, and delivery." Unlike the European plants, the two U.S. operations don't carry out chemical synthesis, so they focus on customized packaging and delivery of process chemicals. The increased scale of DNA synthesis means a need for more process solvents like acetonitrile, , so a growing business is switching drug industry customers from using disposable packages to using 50-, 200-, and 1,350-L returnable drums. The largest containers are the most economical, but some companies can't accept them without reconfiguring their often cramped facilities, so Co. Fisher is working with drug and biotech industry customers to make this switch. Brown points to a biopharmaceutical firm that was expanding its facility and consuming more Co. products. "We sent in engineering people to define their needs and the most cost-effective way to meet them," he says. "In the end, they substantially changed their original design concept." Brown sees a growing role for the chemical division--and parent Co. as a whole--as pharmaceutical companies grapple with the headaches of expanding from the laboratory to commercial scale. "Anything they don't believe is core, they will want help finding cheaper, better, and faster ways of doing," he says. |
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| SALES VALUE | $2.9 billion last year |
| UPDATE | 02.02 |
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