Merck Serono, the biopharmaceutical arm of Germany’s Merck KGaA, has laid the cornerstone for a new €65 million laboratory at its Darmstadt headquarters. When completed in 2017, some 200 employees will work in the 16,000 m² building designed to accelerate innovation in R&D.

The research building will unite various functions within R&D Discovery Technologies at Merck, including Molecular Pharmacology; Medicinal Chemistry; Computational Chemistry; Molecular Interactions and Biophysics; Protein Engineering and Antibody Technologies, along with Protein and Cell Sciences.

Over the next few years, “we are poised to deliver the innovation discovered in our own laboratories to patients in need around the world,” Belén Garijo, member of the Merck executive board and CEO of Healthcare, said at the cornerstone-laying ceremony.

The Germany-based group, which employs 2,000 scientific and clinical development professionals at its R&D hubs in Darmstadt, Boston, Massachusetts in the US, Tokyo, Japan, and Beijing, China. Core areas of focus at the four locations are oncology, immuno-oncolgy and immunology.