CSL Behring Brand Guidelines: Behringwerke of 1904, Melbourne’s CSL & a Swiss Red Cross Lab

A Nobel laureate’s serum works in Marburg.

The German half of CSL Behring begins with Emil von Behring, who became a professor at the University of Marburg in 1895 and received the first Nobel Prize in medicine in 1901 for serum therapy against diphtheria. German Wikipedia says he used the prize money to found a factory to make the serum, and in 1904, with the Marburg pharmacist Carl Siebert, set up the Behring-Werk. The University of Marburg’s Behring library notes that before this he had worked with the Farbwerke Hoechst, and let that contract end in 1904. In 1913 the works bought an old brickworks in neighbouring Marbach, which became the company’s main site.

In 1929 the Behringwerke were taken over by I.G. Farbenindustrie, then the largest chemical and pharmaceutical group in the world. German Wikipedia, citing the historian Thomas Werther’s 2004 Marburg dissertation and his chapter in the City of Marburg’s 2005 study of forced labour, sets out what followed. From 1937 the Behringwerke were drawn into war preparations, and from September 1941 until March 1945 hundreds of men and women were made to do forced labour there — civilian workers, mostly from eastern Europe, and Soviet prisoners of war. When the US Army took Marburg on 28 March 1945, 278 people were freed from the forced-labour camp at Marbach, 37 per cent of a workforce of 744.

The same sources record the works’ part in medical crimes. From 1942, under its director Albert Demnitz and as part of I.G. Farben, the Behringwerke took part with the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS in typhus vaccine experiments on prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Vaccine trials were carried out on 537 prisoners, 127 of whom died, and further prisoners were deliberately infected to keep a supply of the pathogen, German Wikipedia says. The University of Marburg returned to this history in an exhibition on the Behringwerke and the university, held at the Hessian State Archives in Marburg from November 2021 to March 2022.

After the war the works added plasma products, from 1946, and when I.G. Farben was broken up they became a subsidiary of Hoechst in 1952. The company built its later reputation in clotting medicines; English Wikipedia dates its Haemate factor VIII and von Willebrand factor concentrate to 1981.

A government laboratory in Melbourne, and a Red Cross lab in Bern.

The Australian half began in 1916, when the federal government set up the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories to make vaccines. Under its first director, William Penfold, it opened in 1918 in a vacant building of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and moved to purpose-built premises at Parkville the following year, English Wikipedia says. Snake antivenoms, penicillin for the Australian military from 1944 and the Salk polio vaccine followed, and plasma fractionation began in 1952. The laboratories stayed wholly government-owned until 1994, when they were privatised as CSL Ltd and listed on the Australian stock exchange.

A Swiss strand joined next. German Wikipedia says the Swiss Red Cross founded its central blood-transfusion laboratory, the Zentrallaboratorium Blutspendedienst SRK — ZLB — in Bern in 1949, and that it was allowed to make and sell plasma medicines from 1951. CSL bought it from the Red Cross in 2000 and made it a company, ZLB Bioplasma; in 2001 it added US plasma collection, under the name ZLB Plasma Services.

Meanwhile Hoechst was breaking up the Behringwerke. In early 1996 their plasma business was combined with Armour, part of Rhône-Poulenc, in a joint venture called Centeon; when Hoechst and Rhône-Poulenc merged into Aventis in 1999, Centeon became Aventis Behring. Its sale to CSL was agreed in December 2003 and completed in the first half of 2004, German Wikipedia says, and CSL merged it with ZLB Bioplasma as ZLB Behring. The ZLB initials were replaced by CSL at the end of 2006, according to German Wikipedia, while English Wikipedia dates the CSL Behring name to 2007; in 2009 ZLB Plasma was renamed CSL Plasma.

How plasma companies present themselves.

Plasma companies sell medicines that most people never see on a shelf, so their public image is built around the people at either end of the chain. Websites, annual reports and recruitment pages for the sector tend to open on donors: someone relaxing in a reclining chair in a bright, clean collection centre, a nurse at their side, with the equipment kept small in the frame. The tone is calm and grateful rather than clinical.

The middle of the chain is shown through hands and buildings. Close-ups of gloved hands holding vials, labelled blood bags and racks of tubes signal laboratory care without showing a face, while aerial photographs of large fractionation plants, steel tanks and clean-room corridors stand for scale. Collection-device makers add their own register of machines, tubing sets and touchscreens, usually photographed on white.

At the far end are patients. Several of the conditions these medicines are used for are rare, and the companies’ storytelling often leans on named families, children and long-term patients, often filmed at home or outdoors, alongside patient-organisation partnerships and awareness days. Scientific credibility is carried by medical congresses such as those of the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis (ISTH) and the American Society of Hematology (ASH), and by industry meetings such as the Plasma Protein Forum.

The visual identities themselves are mostly quiet: corporate sans-serif wordmarks, generous white space and restrained palettes, with brand colour used sparingly against photography. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One name for three histories.

CSL Behring is now one of the businesses of CSL Limited, which keeps its headquarters at Parkville in Melbourne. In August 2022, English Wikipedia says, CSL renamed all its divisions to begin with its own initials: CSL Behring, CSL Plasma, CSL Seqirus for influenza vaccines and CSL Vifor, after the purchase of the Swiss drugmaker Vifor Pharma. CSL Behring’s own base in the United States is at King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and its major plants are in Bern, Marburg, Kankakee in Illinois and Broadmeadows in Victoria.

Marburg remains the biggest of them. German Wikipedia calls it the largest production and research site of the CSL group, with about 3,200 staff, on the former Behringwerke grounds that are now run as an industrial park shared with other drug companies. In 2023 CSL Behring opened a new base-fractionation plant at Görzhausen, on the park, replacing the older plant at Marbach. In July 2025 CSL Innovation announced that it would wind down its research and development in Marburg step by step, German Wikipedia reports, with about 500 jobs affected.

German Wikipedia describes its work as plasma-derived and recombinant medicines for clotting disorders, intensive care and immunoglobulins, and English Wikipedia notes that it runs its own collection network, CSL Plasma. Its name still carries two founders of different kinds: a Nobel laureate in Marburg, and a government laboratory set up in Australia in 1916.

For a design guide, CSL Behring shows how a group can fold several older names — Behringwerke, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories and the Red Cross’s ZLB — into one compound name. Compare Grifols, another plasma group built on donor networks, and Takeda, the Japanese drugmaker. For this guide we use claret, slate and paper with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep CSL Behring’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.