Thermo Fisher continues to invest in area facilities

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In one of the final scenes of “Free Solo”—a documentary on Alex Honnold, the first person to scale Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan without the use of ropes or tools—Honnold crests the 3,000-foot granite wall and holds a recognizable tie to Rochester.

“What’s really amazing, at the end of the scene he only had two things with him: he had an apple and he had a 32-ounce Nalgene bottle,” said Siqi Tan, vice president and general manager of Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.’s Laboratory Plastics Essentials division.

The water bottle was made at Thermo Fisher’s Fairport manufacturing facility. The scene signals both the appeal and wide variety of products that come out of the company’s three local facilities, which in addition to the Fairport plant includes a manufacturing plant in Penfield and a distribution center near Lexington Avenue in the city.

“We have over 1,100 colleagues in the Rochester area,” Tan said.

That means a big investment in the equipment that allows Thermo Fisher to continue to make innovative products here and elsewhere.

“We spend millions of dollars every year to put new capital equipment into the site,” Tan said, and it’s an investment that doesn’t necessarily have a quick pay-off.

“Some of these machines are 250 tons and hundreds of thousands of dollars per mold, and usually it takes somewhere between six months to two years to put one of these machines in,” he explained. “It’s planned out months in advance. We have a continual process of investing in those machines.”

Headquartered in Waltham, Mass., the biotechnology product development company annually posts revenues of $24 billion and has 70,000 employees worldwide. The company’s products range from water bottles to diagnostic testing tools to bulk weighing solutions and everything in between.

“We enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer,” Tan said, describing the public company’s vision.

In addition to Nalgene water bottles, employees at the two local manufacturing facilities make urine sample collection containers and in-home diagnostic test products. Cologuard by Exact Sciences Corp. is an at-home screening for colorectal cancer, and it is the only FDA-approved test based on stool DNA science. The sample collection bottles are made in Rochester.

“At the Rochester facilities, Laboratory Plastics Essentials is converting the raw material resins through a variety of different molding techniques,” said Shawn LaBarge, Rochester site leader. “We have a variety of different product categories that we’re servicing the markets to, from supporting research and development in all the laboratories across the world to mass production customers that are using our products with their products as a delivery system.”

In fact, Tan said, you would be hard pressed to walk into any sizable research lab around the world and not find a Thermo Fisher product.

“We touch a lot of different customers, from R&D to customers … making products such as diagnostic kits for a variety of diseases such as cancer and diabetes,” Tan said, in addition to products used in the creation of flu and other vaccines.

So ensuring that critical government funding continues to reach labs where scientists develop those vaccines and research cures for diseases is of utmost importance to Thermo Fisher. That prompted a summer visit from U.S. Rep. Joseph Morelle, who toured the Penfield facility, learning more about what happens at the site and its importance locally and nationally.

During a town hall at the site, Morelle said he takes a personal interest in companies such as Thermo Fisher, which provides researchers with the tools they need to find cures for diseases. Morelle lost his daughter to breast cancer two years ago.

He noted that the House approved appropriations funding of $41.1 billion for the National Institutes of Health, some $2 billion above last year’s funding. That bodes well for companies like Thermo Fisher, he said.

“The more research that’s done, particularly in pharma and biology, the more that you’re going to be important partners in that and making sure that that research gets done,” Morelle told employees.

That’s good news for Thermo Fisher, which shows no signs of slowing down. “We’re bringing in new colleagues pretty much weekly,” LaBarge said.

During the first month or so of summer the company hired 50 or more people in Rochester, Tan added, and the company also offers internships in STEM areas, as well as in marketing and finance.

“The reason for having the congressman visit is to really show how the products that we make have an impact on the health and well-being of the people on the planet. A lot of that really starts with continued government funding through either the NIH or the National Science Foundation,” Tan said. “That’s also something critical to the Rochester region in general. We have a lot of good research hospitals in the area and most of those are our customers, so continued government funding for those really critical research programs, whether it’s into disease or some preventive healthcare, supports not just us but the overall ecosystem.”

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