Thermo Fisher grew into a lab giant by buying company after company
Most laboratories on Earth probably contain something from Thermo Fisher, whether a Nalgene bottle, an Invitrogen reagent or an electron microscope. The company behind them was born from a 2006 merger and has since spent tens of billions on acquisitions, reaching 44.556 billion dollars in revenue in 2025.
Its two halves had long histories. Fisher Scientific was founded in Pittsburgh in 1902 by Chester Fisher to supply laboratory equipment and chemicals. Thermo Electron came later, in 1956, co-founded by George Hatsopoulos, an MIT engineering PhD, and Peter Nomikos, a Harvard Business School graduate. They agreed in May 2006 to combine through a stock swap, creating a company of about 30,000 employees. Regulators objected to overlap in one niche product, centrifugal evaporators, and a unit called Genevac had to be sold before the deal fully closed in 2007.
Then came the buying spree. The biggest early prize was Life Technologies in 2013 for 13.6 billion dollars, won against Roche and bringing DNA sequencing, Applied Biosystems and the cell culture brand Gibco. FEI, a maker of electron microscopes, followed in 2016, and the drug manufacturer Patheon in 2017. In 2021 it paid 17.4 billion dollars in cash for PPD, a contract research organisation, plus roughly 3.5 billion of debt. A 2020 attempt to buy the diagnostics firm Qiagen collapsed even after the offer was raised.
The pandemic highlighted its role. In March 2020 it won emergency authorisation from US regulators for a coronavirus test, opened a plant in Lenexa to churn out testing supplies, and helped Pfizer and Moderna produce mRNA vaccines, later signing a 15-year manufacturing deal with Moderna.
Marc Casper, who joined from the life sciences side of Thermo Electron in 2001, has run the company as chief executive since October 2009. Recent projects include backing the UK Biobank's effort to measure more than 5,400 proteins across 600,000 samples, the largest human proteomics study yet attempted.
Source: Thermo Fisher Scientific
