Centerpiece of the investment will be a new 1,200-m² facility in Glasgow to house molecular biology and sequencing services. This will enable the expansion of testing capacity in the facility’s current buildings with biosafety testing, analytical development and viral clearance suites.

With its BioReliance testing services portfolio, Merck by its own account performs more than 20,000 studies in the UK annually, for more than 500 clients globally. This and the recently formed Millipore CTDMO Services are part of the Darmstadt-based company’s Life Science Services business unit.

The latest investment in Scotland follows recent testing expansion at Merck’s Rockville, Maryland, USA, and Shanghai, China, sites.

As biosafety testing is a critical step in the drug development and manufacturing process that ensures drugs are safe, efficacious and meet regulatory requirements, Dirk Lange, head of Life Science Services, said that, to meet the growing demand, since mid-2022 the company has earmarked capital investment in this field totaling more than €350 million.

According to David McClelland, site head and managing director for the Scottish sites, the biosafety testing services at Glasgow and Stirling have been experiencing strong double-digit growth for several years.

Merck moving away from animal tests?

In other Merck news, CEO Belén Garijo has told a German newspaper that the company will “noticeably reduce” the number of animal tests it conducts in its R&D trials and eventually get by without such tests altogether.

In 2022 alone, Merck used almost 150,000 animals, for the most part rats and mice, in testing, Garijo told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Over the past five years, she said, the number has sunk by 17%, but this is not enough.

Garijo said alternative research methods, such as experiments using cell cultures in laboratories, “can also deliver reliable data,” but European regulatory authorities would need to approve these procedures, as has already been done to some degree in Canada and the US.

A European rethink is in progress, the CEO said, and even if widespread replacement methods – which she added may be even more reliable than animal experiments – are not yet ready to be deployed, this could happen “in years, rather than decades.”

Author: Dede Williams, Freelance Journalist