Everything we do starts with our Mission: to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer. The nature of our business is to enable growth and innovation within the global scientific community and to help researchers, organizations, and companies solve some of the world’s most pressing issues. We do that by providing cutting-edge technologies and services that are the result of our significant investment in research and development. We believe creating a better tomorrow starts with the action we take today, and we continually strive toward improvement and excellence for the benefit of our customers, our colleagues, and the world.
At Thermo Fisher, we facilitate growth and discovery across the scientific community. Globally, we have been issued 7,500 patents over the last five years.
In 2021, we increased our investment in R&D by approximately 19% to $1.4 billion. These investments drive innovation across our business and strengthen our support of customers. As an example, in 2021, we announced new strategic partnerships with the Mayo Clinic, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, San Francisco. Through these collaborations, we are supporting the development of cutting-edge cancer and cell-based therapies, enhancing metabolomics research and accelerating the adoption of precision medicine. By enabling our customers to advance their important work, we are making our world a better place.
$1.4B
Invested in Research and Development
Over the past decade, our customers have made significant strides in precision medicine with dozens of novel therapies that allow for more personalized and targeted approaches to treatment. When fighting cancer, one prominent cell therapy (CAR T) harvests a patient’s immune T-cells, modifies them to target and kill cancer cells, and then reintroduces those cells back into the patient. This therapy has been proven to prevent the relapse of blood cancers. Learn how CAR T helped five-year-old Gideon and his family find hope again.
Unfortunately, the highly customized CAR T approach is costly. To make treatment more accessible, our customers have been exploring ways to scale by using healthy donor T-cells (allogeneic therapies) instead of T-cells from the individual patient (autologous therapies). If successful, CAR T could become more cost-efficient and widely used.
In 2021, we delivered a product to help customers bring this life-saving therapy to patients faster. Thermo Fisher’s Gibco™ CTS™ OpTmizer™ Pro Serum-Free Medium is a first-ofits-kind media solution specifically formulated to culture healthy donor cells for use in cell therapies. It supports the development and commercialization of allogeneic, off-the-shelf therapies that have the potential to make targeted cancer treatment more affordable and accessible to the many cancer patients in need.