GE Healthcare to Hire 100 New Employees for Massachusetts Facility

January 22, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

BOSTON – GE Healthcare Life Sciences plans to bolster its new corporate offices in Massachusetts with the hiring of 100 new employees, the Boston Business Journal reported Thursday afternoon.

The new hires are part of the company’s shift of its corporate headquarters from Chicago to Massachusetts, a plan that’s been in the works since 2014. The company will move into a newly renovated $21 milling facility, the Journal said. The company told the Journal that it made sense to consolidate their resources in Massachusetts due to the increasing growth of biotech and pharma companies in the Boston area.

When GE announced the move to Massachusetts in 2014, it said the new corporate site will have room for “more than 500 GE Healthcare Life Sciences employees, including the creation of more than 220 new jobs in the US's leading life sciences and biotechnology cluster.”

There is still some work being done to the new site in Marlborough, Mass., as construction is still going on in what will be laboratory space, the Journal noted.

Ge Life Sciences division has a focus on cell therapies, including ways to collect and transport cells in ways to help develop personalized medicine. GE Life Sciences also helps biotech companies figure out how to mass manufacture therapies for either clinical trials or commercialization, the Boston Business Journal said.

In December, GE Life Sciences announced a $100 million investment in its Uppsala, Sweden facility to double manufacturing capacity for chromatography media by the end of 2018. Chromatography medium is a key component in the production of biopharmaceuticals such as insulin and monoclonal antibodies.

GE Life Sciences is a division of GE Healthcare that focuses on drug development as well as diagnostic and imaging equipment and healthcare IT products. In August, GE Healthcare received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a low dose computed tomography (CT) lung cancer screening option. Additionally, Medicare has approved insurance reimbursement for its beneficiaries who are eligible for the use of low dose CT lung cancer screening in high-risk patients, the company said. GE Healthcare’s low-dose screening protocols are tailored to the CT system, patient size, and the most current recommendations from a wide range of professional medical and governmental organizations.

The company also announced it was spending more than $1 billion over the next five years for the development of its educational offerings to reach more than two million healthcare professionals worldwide. The training program is aimed at helping the workers improve healthcare from within through enhanced training programs and solutions for physicians, radiologists, technologists, midwives, nurses, biomedical engineers and beyond. Solutions will be geared to meet local needs and will include new clinical, product application, technical and leadership training and education, the company said.