GE Healthcare, a unit of GE, will acquire Xcellerex, Inc. for an undisclosed price. The acquisition will allow GE Healthcare to expand its offering of products and services for the manufacture of biopharmaceuticals such as recombinant proteins, antibodies and vaccines. According to a GE statement, “The strong strategic fit between the two companies, combined with expanded capabilities in product development and marketing, will offer significant customer benefits.”

Xcellerex develops and produces turn-key biomanufacturing systems and production-scale bioreactors based around single-use components, in order to enable faster installation, lower capital investment, reduced risk of cross-contamination, and significantly increased flexibility compared with traditional manufacturing technologies. Xcellerex’s FlexFactory is a complete custom-designed modular production platform based around single-use technologies that helps customers quickly deploy manufacturing capacity.

Dr. Nigel Darby, vice president of BioTechnologies and chief technology officer at GE Healthcare Life Sciences, said, “GE Healthcare has built a world-class set of tools, technologies and services for the biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry, and by adding Xcellerex’s innovative products to our portfolio, we will be able to strongly enhance our customer offering. GE and Xcellerex share the vision that an integrated approach, where we can help customers optimize every stage of their manufacturing process, has the potential to increase production flexibility and to deliver higher yields of finished product while reducing time to market. With the global focus on spiralling health costs and the need for sustainable healthcare, these are critical issues for the industry.”

Guy Broadbent, president and chief executive officer of Xcellerex, commented, “We are very excited to become part of GE Healthcare’s Life Sciences business. The combination of Xcellerex’s people, technologies and services with the resources and global reach of GE Healthcare will allow us to bring forward our plans to grow the business. The integration of Xcellerex’s products with GE Healthcare’s complementary capabilities in upstream and downstream bioprocessing will help bring great benefits to our customers. The entire Xcellerex team looks forward to joining GE.”

The acquisition is expected to close in Q2 2012.