In April this year, GE Healthcare Life Sciences announced that GE completed a strategic minority investment in Irish-owned Zenith Technologies.
This enhancement of the existing partnership brought Zenith’s automation expertise to GE Healthcare’s customers, helping biopharmaceutical manufacturers to improve its product quality, productivity, and efficiency. The investment also brought increased automation capability to the heart of new product development at GE.
Zenith delivers automation management and process integration to its globally diverse customer base, supporting the process and technology choices that each customer makes, from consultancy, systems integration to managed services.
Executive chairman and founder of Zenith Technologies Brendan O’Regan said: "Zenith has grown significantly over the last number of years and now has more than 700 people globally.
"Zenith is engaged with the top ten life science companies and we are looking forward to continuing to work with GE Healthcare and the next-generation of manufacturing solutions. This investment by GE will further enhance our recent partnership and collaboration, and will enable an acceleration of growth for Zenith."
General manager of bioprocesses at GE Healthcare Life Sciences Jan Makela said: "In a complex and highly regulated industry, automation is critical for our customers, who want to establish biomanufacturing capacity quickly and at a lower cost. This is often in challenging markets, where the access to life-saving therapies is limited. With many years of experience in a wide diversity of customer applications, Zenith Technologies can strengthen our end-to-end solutions even further. This is a significant strategic investment by GE and the next step in developing our market-changing FlexFactory and KUBio manufacturing solutions."
Automation replaces many manual operations in today’s biopharmaceutical production and it plays a central role in manufacturing coordination, control, and documentation. Batch-to-batch consistency and continuous monitoring, are enhanced through application of automation practices.