Merck Millipore


Merck Millipore was the brand used for Merck's global life science business until 2015 when the company re-branded. It was originally formed when Merck acquired the Millipore Corporation in 2010. Merck is a supplier to the life science industry. The Millipore Corporation was founded in 1954, and listed among the S&P 500 since the early 1990s, as an international biosciences company, known widely for its micrometer pore-size filters and tests. In 2015, Merck acquired Sigma-Aldrich and merged it with Merck Millipore. In the United States and Canada, the life science business is now known as MilliporeSigma.

History

Formation and naming

In the early 1950s, Lovell Corporation won a contract from the U.S. Army Chemical Engineers to develop and manufacture membrane filtering devices and systems used to separate the molecular components of fluid samples. When the membranes were declassified in 1953 and offered for commercial use, Jack Bush, a Lovell employee, bought the company’s right to the technology for $200,000 and established the Millipore Filter Company. Bush coined the word millipore to use in the company's name to refer to large number of small openings in the microporous membrane that the company produced. At this point, however, "millipore" has become an actual word in general use apart from this company's use of it, referring to any of several filters, made from cellulose acetate membranes, capable of removing very small particles. Later the company changed its name to Millipore Corporation to reflect its growing range of products. In 2010, Merck KGaA the world's oldest chemical and pharmaceutical company- acquired Millipore Corporation to form EMD Millipore.

Filters

By 1959, Millipore made porous membrane filters of cellulose esters or other materials which resembled paper in sheet form, and were brittle when dry but friable when wet. Filters consisted of nitrocellulose or polycarbonate membrane nucleopore filters ranging from pore size of 0.2 μm to 20 µm. Modern filter are Polyvinylidene fluoride and/or Polypropylene based.

Growth

By 1970, Millipore had established subsidiaries in seven countries. The company opened manufacturing plants in Jaffrey, New Hampshire; Molsheim, France; Cork, Ireland; and several other locations. Millipore’s 2006 acquisition of Serologicals Corporation improved the company's position in high-growth markets such as drug discovery products and services, antibodies, cell biology reagents, and stem cell research. As of the late 2000s, Millipore was the only company providing both upstream cell culture and downstream separations offerings for biopharmaceutical production.

Milestones

Here are some of the key milestones representative of Millipore’s changes and growth over the past five decades.

1950s

Millipore Corporation had been publicly traded on the OTC, or NASDAQ, exchange where it had paid a cash dividend to shareholders every year since 1966. In 1987 Millipore Corporation moved from the NASDAQ exchange to the New York Stock Exchange, where it traded under the ticker symbol MIL. Millipore Corporation was on the S&P 500 list of the biggest publicly traded companies in the United States until it was acquired by Merck kGaA in 2010. The deal was valued at approximately EUR 5.3 billion. Merck KGaA is not associated with Merck & Co., although the two companies stem from the same parent company.