MilliporeSigma plans to build a new campus in Burlington, Massachusetts that will serve as a major hub for the North American life science business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. The 280,000-square-foot facility will include a customer collaboration laboratory and training center as well as office space.

The campus will house both a customer service and call center and an M Lab Collaboration Center, a shared exploratory environment where the company's scientists and engineers work together with customers. The M Lab Collaboration Center will be one of nine centers worldwide created specifically for collaboration, where hands-on training, customer experiments, and application troubleshooting take place in a non-GMP environment. Other locations will include Brazil, China, France, India, Singapore, and South Korea. This new enhanced M Lab Collaboration Center in Burlington will replace the flagship M Lab at the company's facility in Billerica, Massachusetts. MilliporeSigma's 850 full-time Billerica-based employees will relocate to the new campus when construction is complete in the second half of 2017.

The five-story, single-tenant building in Burlington includes an opportunity to expand an additional 70,000 square feet. Merck KGaA, whose life science business operates as MilliporeSigma in the United States and Canada, leases the property. MilliporeSigma will maintain its other North American life science hub in St. Louis, Missouri.

Source: MilliporeSigma