Grifols Brand Guidelines: A 1909 Barcelona Laboratory, Plasma Centres & a Family Name

A haematologist, his sons and freeze-dried plasma.

Grifols traces its start to Barcelona in 1909, when the haematologist Josep Antoni Grífols i Roig founded a clinical-analysis laboratory, the Instituto Central de Análisis Clínicos, Bacteriológicos y Químicos. Both Spanish and English Wikipedia describe it as the precursor of Laboratorios Grifols, and say that Grífols i Roig patented a device for indirect blood transfusion, the transfusion flébula — in their words, the first instrument of its kind in Spain.

After the war, the encyclopedia says, he and his two sons — Josep Antoni Grífols i Lucas, a haematologist, and Víctor Grífols i Lucas, a chemist and pharmacist — founded Laboratorios Grifols, a business built on clinical analysis and the preparation of freeze-dried plasma. In 1952 the British Medical Journal published a study led by Grífols i Lucas on the systematic use of plasmapheresis in people; Spanish Wikipedia calls it the first publication of its kind anywhere.

The family moved from the laboratory bench into industry. Plasma fractionation began at Grifols in Barcelona in 1957, Spanish Wikipedia says, and in 1972 production moved to a new plant at Parets del Vallès, in the province of Barcelona. In 1987 Víctor Grífols Roura took control and the company created a holding, Grupo Grifols, joining its clinical-diagnostics, plasma-derivatives and parenteral-solutions businesses with the company that sold their products. A year later it opened its first foreign subsidiary, in Portugal.

The shares followed. Grifols has traded on the Spanish stock exchange since 17 May 2006, has been part of the IBEX 35 index since 2 January 2008, and has been listed on Nasdaq since 1 June 2011, after it bought the American plasma company Talecris Biotherapeutics. Its headquarters are in Sant Cugat del Vallès, outside Barcelona, and members of the founding family have stayed in senior roles: in April 2022 the company’s press release named Víctor Grífols Deu and Raimon Grífols Roura as co-chief executives.

Donation centres, fractionation plants and diagnostics.

Grifols grew in the United States by buying plasma supply. In 2002 it acquired SeraCare, now called Biomat, and with it its first group of plasma donation centres — 43 of them, all in the US, according to Wikipedia. In 2003 it bought Alpha Therapeutic Corporation, including a fractionation plant in Los Angeles. The 2011 purchase of Talecris, English Wikipedia says, made Grifols the third-largest maker of plasma-derived medicines in the world; Spanish Wikipedia singles out its plant at Clayton, North Carolina, as one of the largest plasma-fractionation plants anywhere.

It also built a diagnostics arm around blood transfusion. In 2014 it bought the blood-transfusion diagnostics unit of Novartis, based in Emeryville, California, which had come to Novartis with Chiron; in 2017 it added Hologic’s transfusion business, which Wikipedia links to its reagents and instruments for nucleic-acid testing. The donor network kept growing — the German collector Haema in 2018 and Interstate Blood Bank in 2019 — and Wikipedia now puts it at about 400 donation centres, most of them in the United States. The encyclopedia counts 15 industrial sites in seven countries, all designed and built by the in-house Grifols Engineering.

The medicines are the familiar plasma range: immunoglobulins, albumin, factor VIII and alpha-1 antitrypsin, alongside antithrombin, fibrinogen and hyperimmune immunoglobulins. The company groups its work under immunology, infectious diseases, pulmonology and critical care. For research it took full control of Alkahest, which studies the plasma proteome, in 2020 after a large stake in 2015, and of GigaGen, which works on recombinant polyclonal antibodies, in 2021.

The largest European step came in Germany. On 25 April 2022 Grifols announced it had completed the purchase of Tiancheng (Germany) Pharmaceutical Holdings, which held 89.88% of the ordinary shares of Biotest of Dreieich; after its takeover offer, the company said, it controlled 96.20% of Biotest’s voting rights and 69.72% of its share capital. Grifols has also signed public-private agreements: a joint venture with Egypt’s National Service Projects Organization in 2020, a long-term agreement with Canadian Blood Services in 2022, and alliances in China with Shanghai RAAS in 2020 and the Haier Group in 2023.

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.

A short-seller report, a withdrawn bid and a regulator’s ruling.

The company’s recent history has been played out in public. On 9 January 2024 the American short seller Gotham City Research published the first of several reports questioning Grifols’ financial accounting, and the share price fell sharply, Spanish Wikipedia says. Grifols rejected the claims as false and misleading and took legal action against Gotham in Spain and the United States; in April 2024 it announced it would bring in independent directors to improve its governance. In May 2025 a federal court in New York ruled that there were sufficient grounds for a defamation case against Gotham to proceed, and English Wikipedia reports that Spain’s High Court opened an investigation into the short seller in November 2024.

In July 2024 the Grifols family and the Canadian investor Brookfield agreed to study a joint takeover bid that would have taken the company off the Nasdaq and Madrid exchanges. In November 2024 Grifols announced that those talks had ended. Then, on 6 August 2025, Spain’s official gazette, the Boletín Oficial del Estado, published a decision of the Spanish securities regulator, the CNMV, imposing two sanctions on Grifols, S.A. and its directors, Spanish Wikipedia reports: one classed as very serious, for supplying regulated financial information with inaccurate data or misleading information, and one classed as serious, for omissions in the management report required of listed companies.

Through all of this the family name has stayed on the door. Wikipedia puts its workforce at more than 23,800 people in more than 110 countries, and its foundations carry family names too: the Fundació Víctor Grífols i Lucas, set up in 1998 to support bioethics research and debate, and the Fundación José Antonio Grífols Lucas, which since 2008 has supported communities around its American donation centres, according to Spanish Wikipedia.

For a design guide, Grifols shows how a family laboratory name can be carried across a donor network, diagnostics business and a listed group while the founders’ surname stays the brand. Compare Biotest, the German plasma company it now controls, and Octapharma, the Swiss plasma company. For this guide we use navy, amber and white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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