Fujifilm Diosynth Brand Guidelines: Merck’s Biologics Network, Holly Springs & a 2025 Rename

A biologics network assembled from Akzo Nobel, Avecia and Merck.

Fujifilm Diosynth is the contract development and manufacturing business of the Japanese group Fujifilm, and it was put together from older businesses rather than founded from scratch. English Wikipedia traces the Diosynth line to Oss, in the Netherlands, in 1923, where it began by extracting insulin from bovine pancreata, adding porcine insulin extraction in 1930. The sources read for this guide do not describe the Oss works under the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940–45. For most of its history, the same article says, Diosynth made biochemical substances and fine chemicals, with raw materials coming largely from animal sources or chemical intermediates.

The ownership chain is long. Diosynth sat inside the Akzo Nobel pharmaceutical group, alongside Organon and Intervet, and English Wikipedia says it became part of Organon in January 2005. BioPharm International reported in March 2011 that Schering-Plough acquired Akzo Nobel’s human and animal-health business in 2007 and that Merck & Co. acquired Schering-Plough in 2009. Late in 2009 Merck also bought the biologics site at Billingham, in north-east England, from the contract manufacturer Avecia. Under Merck the two strands were run together as the Merck BioManufacturing Network, known as the MSD BioManufacturing Network outside the United States and Canada.

On 28 February 2011 Fujifilm and Merck announced that Fujifilm would buy that network. BioPharm International described the deal as the purchase of all the equity in two Merck subsidiaries, Diosynth RTP in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and MSD Biologics (UK) in Billingham, together with their manufacturing contracts, support operations and workforce. The business made recombinant proteins, vaccines and monoclonal antibodies under contract, and the financial terms were not disclosed. The company says the purchase was completed on 1 April 2011, and the business took the name FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies, often shortened to FDB.

Fujifilm, the parent, is a Japanese group whose own history, including its pre-war and wartime years, belongs to the parent company and sits outside this guide’s line, which follows Diosynth from Oss and the Billingham works.

Bioreactors, vaccines and new sites.

Under Fujifilm the business moved away from the small molecules of Diosynth’s past. English Wikipedia says it no longer focuses on small molecules and instead develops processes for, and manufactures, biologics such as proteins and mRNA. Its own website now describes work in mammalian cell culture, microbial fermentation, insect cell culture, gene and cell therapies and vaccines, running from cell-line and process development through drug substance, drug product and finished goods.

The network grew by acquisition and by building. On 18 December 2014, English Wikipedia says, the company acquired Kalon Biotherapeutics in College Station, Texas, which became Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies Texas; the article describes the College Station plant as operating under the federal government’s Center for Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing programme. In 2019 Fujifilm bought Biogen’s manufacturing site at Hillerød in Denmark, the same article says. During the pandemic, English Wikipedia reports, citing The Guardian and TeessideLive, Billingham was lined up to make doses of the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine for the UK government, subject to regulatory approval.

Today the company’s website lists sites in Cambridge, Massachusetts; College Station; Holly Springs and Research Triangle Park in North Carolina; Thousand Oaks, California; Billingham and Wilton in the UK; Denmark; and Japan.

The biggest project is Holly Springs, in Wake County, North Carolina. English Wikipedia, citing the company and the Triangle Business Journal, says Fujifilm chose the town in March 2021. Fujifilm says it held the grand opening on 24 September 2025, with North Carolina’s governor among the guests, and that the first phase opened with eight 20,000-litre mammalian cell-culture bioreactors for drug substance and drug product, with finished goods to be added in 2026; a second phase announced in 2024 is to add eight more. The company says the site was built to the blueprint of its first expansion in Denmark, an approach it calls kojoX, and describes Holly Springs as its largest end-to-end cell-culture facility in North America.

Design and documentation.

Contract development and manufacturing organisations, or CDMOs, make medicines for other companies. A drug developer may hand them a cell line, a molecule or a finished formula, and the partner develops the process, makes the drug substance, fills it into vials, syringes or capsules and packs it for trials or for sale. Most of that work happens out of public view, under the customer’s name rather than the maker’s, so the manufacturer’s own brand speaks mainly to other businesses.

The imagery of the trade is fairly consistent. Websites and brochures tend to show tall stainless-steel bioreactors and rows of single-use bags in bright, white production suites; operators in full gowns, hoods and gloves working in cleanrooms; and filling lines carrying glass vials. Aerial photographs of large new plants, often shown under construction or on opening day, stand in for scale, and site maps of a global network do the same job for reach.

Much of the brand work happens at trade events. CPHI, the pharmaceutical trade fair, and the BIO International Convention in the United States are where these companies take stands, announce deals and, at times, unveil new identities: Pharma Manufacturing reported that Catalent introduced its new corporate brand at CPHI Frankfurt in 2025.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — where it began, who owns it now, which sites and services it describes, and what has been reported about it — and separates documented facts from what the companies say about themselves. The colours and typefaces used here are our own interpretation, not official brand assets.

A 2025 rename under the “Partners for Life” banner.

The Diosynth name has now left the front of the business. On 2 June 2025 Fujifilm announced that FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies would be known as FUJIFILM Biotechnologies, in a rebranding of its life-sciences companies that also turned FUJIFILM Irvine Scientific into FUJIFILM Biosciences. The announcement says the new brand took effect immediately but that the company’s legal name would not change, and it placed the businesses under a Fujifilm Life Sciences umbrella with the tagline “Partners for Life.” The old fujifilmdiosynth.com address now forwards to the new website.

The words around the name follow from that rebrand. The company’s website builds its pages on the Partners for Life line, uses kojoX as the name for its practice of building and running sites to a shared design, and uses the Japanese word “Genki,” which it glosses as enthusiasm, to describe the experience it wants customers to have. Its news pages show it at industry events such as CPHI. English Wikipedia records Martin Meeson as chief executive from 2020 and Lars Petersen from 2023.

For a design guide, Fujifilm Diosynth shows how a business built from several inherited plants can be pulled under one parent name. Compare Fujifilm, the parent group, and Lonza, another biologics manufacturing partner. For this guide we use a deep teal, a steel grey and a pale mint with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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