Thermo Fisher grows capacity, capabilities for its pharma services in strategic expansion
Amid geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty in the U.S. and abroad, Thermo Fisher Scientific’s pharma services business is strategically expanding in 2025 to support growth in its capacity and capabilities to better serve its customers.
Speaking last month at DCAT Week in New York City, Jennifer Cannon, president of commercial operations for Thermo Fisher’s pharma services, acknowledged that it’s “an apprehensive time” from a geopolitical and funding perspective.
“We’ve been listening very acutely to our biopharma and biotech customers in trying to serve their needs,” Cannon said, with strategic investments in pharma services to “support growth in our capacity and capabilities across a really wide range of modalities and drug formats.”
The company offers a spectrum of pharma services including active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), biologics, viral vectors, cell therapies, formulation, clinical trial solutions, logistics services, commercial manufacturing, as well as packaging.
In October 2024, Thermo Fisher introduced its Accelerator Drug Development solutions for emerging biotech and large pharma companies, which provides a suite of manufacturing, clinical research, and supply chain services — including small molecule, biologics, and cell and gene therapies — from pre-clinical to commercialization.
Anil Kane, global head of technical and scientific affairs for Thermo Fisher’s pharma services, told Pharma Manufacturing that its new Accelerator Drug Development offering provides end-to-end contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) and contract research organization (CRO) services.
“Thermo Fisher can provide drug substance manufacturing, drug product manufacturing, labeling, distribution, as well as clinical trials,” Kane said. When it comes to clinical services, the company’s goal is to “speed up the [regulatory] filings for our partners” with “cost and time efficiencies to bring their molecules to patients faster,” according to Kane.
Lyndra Therapeutics is an Accelerator Drug Development customer for which Thermo Fisher is creating a custom manufacturing line in Cincinnati, Ohio, to support innovative oral solid dose technology. The project is expected to break ground in the first half of 2025, with operations continuing through 2027.
The Accelerator Drug Development offering “integrates both our CDMO network, with over 60 sites globally, with our CRO clinical research patient enrollment capabilities,” Cannon said. To enhance data integration and operational efficiencies across its CDMO and CRO sites, Thermo Fisher is spending $1.5 million for “digital enablement that will allow better visibility at the site level” by “seeing demand signals that happen with our patient enrollment sites to clinical trial sites,” according to Cannon.
Thermo Fisher’s Center Valley, Pennsylvania site features a 4,000-square-foot Clinical Trials Innovation Lab, providing co-creation space where company teams collaborate with customers to develop solutions optimized to meet patient needs — including smart packaging, decentralized trial capabilities, real-time temperature and GPS monitoring systems, and the digitization and automation of processes.
Expanding capacity, capabilities in 2025
Thermo Fisher is investing in the infrastructure to support the biopharma industry’s evolving needs when it comes to small molecules, drug products, biologics, and other modalities, according to Kane. “We continue to upgrade the equipment,” he said.
On the drug substance side, Thermo Fisher is expanding capacity in biologics and emerging modalities. In 2025, the company is bringing eight new bioreactors online — four 5,000L single-use bioreactors in Lengnau, Switzerland, and four 2,000L units in St. Louis, Missouri — to meet the growing demand for biologics production.
In addition to traditional biologics, Thermo Fisher is expanding its mRNA capabilities through a collaboration with biotech company Elektrofi to establish a platform cGMP line to support Elektrofi’s planned clinical trials of self-injectable therapies. In late 2024, the companies successfully delivered the first lipid nanoparticle solution and in 2025 are progressing to drug product fill and clinical trial manufacturing.
To support growing demand for drug product manufacturing, Thermo Fisher is expanding capabilities in both sterile and oral solid dose formats at several locations in the U.S. and Europe.
On the sterile fill-finish side, Thermo Fisher is adding five new drug product service lines, including four high-speed prefilled syringe lines and two additional sterile fill-finish lines in Greenville, North Carolina, as well as a new drug product service line in Swindon, UK.
The company is also expanding seven pharmaceutical development service lines to support sterile fill-finish at sites in Italy including Ferentino and Monza, and in the U.S. in Plainville, Massachusetts.
For oral solid dose (OSD) products, Thermo Fisher is adding three new OSD and packaging lines in Cincinnati, Toronto, Canada, and Bourgoin, France, to offer a range of blister, bottle-filling, and compaction solutions. The company is also augmenting its engineered solutions portfolio with new capabilities in compaction, accelerated stability modeling, and spray drying at Thermo Fisher’s Toronto and Bourgoin sites.
Navigating the geopolitical environment
Last month, Thermo Fisher CEO Marc Casper told the TD Cowen Annual Health Care Conference that the company is “well positioned” to navigate the geopolitical environment — including tariffs — and “feels good” about its 2025 outlook. Casper remains optimistic that Thermo Fisher will achieve single-digit market growth this year.
The company announced in late February that it is paying $4.1 billion in cash to buy Solventum’s purification and filtration business, whose technologies are used in the development and manufacturing of biologics, spanning upstream and downstream workflows.
The purification and filtration business, which generated approximately $1 billion of revenue in 2024 for Solventum, is highly complementary to Thermo Fisher’s bioproduction business and strengthens its offering in the high growth bioprocessing market, according to Casper. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of 2025.
At the same time, Casper noted that the CRO industry “lags the upturn that you see in some of the other segments — bioproduction, some of the research tools — so you’ll see lower growth in the first part of 2025” but he assured it will improve as the year progresses.
Thermo Fisher will announce its financial results for the first quarter of 2025 on April 23.
