“COVID-19 crisis has brought together the scientific community like never before”

The UK headquartered Cytiva is a $3.3 billion global life sciences leader with nearly 7000 associates operating in 40 countries dedicated to advancing and accelerating therapeutics. As a trusted partner to customers that range in scale and scope, Cytiva brings speed, efficiency and capacity to research and manufacturing workflows, enabling the development, manufacture and delivery of transformative medicines to patients. Cytiva announced the collaboration with Takara Bio to develop DNA vaccine to confront the virus in Japan, on May 21. BioSpectrum Asia spoke to Francis Van Parys, Vice-President Commercial, Asia-Pacific, Cytiva (Formerly GE Life Sciences), Seoul, South Korea, who is responsible for providing transformational technologies in biopharmaceutical research, manufacturing and diagnostics to Cytiva customers and partners in the life sciences industry in China, India, Japan, Korea, ASEAN and Australia & New Zealand, for his major plans in store and his plans to enhance growth within the APAC region for the company.

- Ankit Kankar

What are the major plans in store for Cytiva? Any new segments to be explored?

Cytiva offers the same high-quality services as we did when we were part of GE Healthcare Life Sciences. It shouldn’t be overlooked that we are already a life sciences global leader and we expect our significant growth of recent years to continue. We have been at the forefront of innovation and development of areas such as protein purification, single-use technology and cell and gene therapies. Cytiva will benefit from being a newly-created organization that is already a global life sciences leader. We have market-leading brands such as ÄKTA, Amersham, HyClone and Whatman, among others. We also have more than 100,000 systems in use globally. We will continue innovating from within and working with our customers to develop next-generation solutions. One area where we want to and must do better is sustainability. This is a challenge and opportunity for any organization operating today and one that Cytiva takes very seriously. We don’t want to be just compliant in sustainability terms, we want to lead the industry. We will be focusing on areas such as GHG emission, use of plastics, packaging, water management and societal impact among other areas.