Terumo BCT Brand Guidelines: COBE’s 1964 Garage, Gambro, CaridianBCT & Lakewood

Two founders, a garage and a tubing pack.

Terumo BCT traces its roots to COBE Laboratories, founded in 1964 by Robert Collins and Randall Bellows. According to the company history in the International Directory of Company Histories, reproduced by FundingUniverse, both men had worked at Pharmaseal, a hospital supplier near San Francisco, and the name COBE was made from the first two letters of their surnames. They started in a garage in Los Angeles, making custom tubing packs that connected patients to heart-lung machines.

In 1965 COBE merged with Medical Marketing, a Seattle firm whose owner had persuaded the Seattle Artificial Kidney Center to use the packs, and that link took the young company into dialysis. In 1967 Collins and Bellows moved the business to Lakewood, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, partly because they wanted a more central base for distribution, the same history says. COBE became a public company in 1972, built dialysis machines under the Centry name, and moved into heart-surgery equipment after buying Galen Laboratories in 1973.

The line that leads to today’s company began in the early 1980s. COBE introduced a therapeutic plasma exchange system, Centry TPE, in 1981, and in 1984 bought the biomedical systems division of IBM, which brought the products that became the COBE 2991 cell processor and the COBE 2997 blood cell separator. In 1988 it introduced the COBE Spectra apheresis system, used to collect individual blood components such as platelets from donors, the company history records.

COBE looked abroad early. Its first international distributor, AMCO, was appointed in Japan in 1967, and its first international subsidiary opened in Brussels in 1973, followed over the next four years by subsidiaries in West Germany, Canada, France and the United Kingdom, according to the same history. By the end of the 1980s, it says, sales were split almost evenly between the medical systems division and the cardiovascular division, with a growing share earned outside the United States.

From COBE BCT to CaridianBCT.

In 1990 COBE agreed to be bought by Gambro, the Swedish medical technology company founded in Lund in 1964. The deal was announced in March and completed in June after review by the US Federal Trade Commission, the FundingUniverse history says, and the founders said the aim was to help market COBE’s products outside the United States. After the sale COBE was divided into subsidiaries, and its blood component technology products were placed in COBE BCT, the first time that business had stood as a separate company. At the time of the deal Gambro was based in Lund and partly owned by the carmaker Volvo, the history adds.

The unit later traded as Gambro BCT. English Wikipedia records that Gambro itself was taken over in 2006 by Indap, a company owned jointly by the Swedish investment firms EQT and Investor AB. In June 2008 the Colorado BioScience Association announced that Gambro BCT, previously a subsidiary of Gambro AB, would be renamed CaridianBCT on 14 July 2008, a name combining the words “care” and “meridian.” The association described the Lakewood company as the largest medical device maker headquartered in Colorado, and the release named its systems: the Trima Accel, the COBE Spectra and the Spectra Optia, along with the Mirasol and Atreus systems, which were then sold in Europe but not in the United States.

Terumo, the Tokyo medical device maker founded in 1921, closed its acquisition of CaridianBCT on 13 April 2011, according to a Business Wire release of October 2011. Terumo’s own earlier history sits outside this guide and is covered in our Terumo guide. That October, at the AABB annual meeting in San Diego, CaridianBCT and Terumo Transfusion, Terumo’s existing blood business, announced that they would unite as Terumo BCT, running as two independent businesses until spring 2012 and keeping the global headquarters in Lakewood.

Blood, plasma and the companies that collect it.

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 Terumo company run from Colorado.

The combination took effect in April 2012. A Business Wire release dated 5 April 2012 said CaridianBCT and Terumo Transfusion “have become Terumo BCT,” a Terumo subsidiary headquartered in Lakewood, and called it the only Terumo Corporation subsidiary with its global headquarters outside Japan. David Perez, CaridianBCT’s president and chief executive, kept that role at the new company. The release listed regional headquarters in Brussels, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and Tokyo, and three customer groups: blood centres; hospitals and therapeutic apheresis centres; and biotech and cell processing.

The company now presents itself as Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies, with Terumo BCT kept as the short form. In an April 2025 release carried by Dow Jones Newswires, it described itself as a medical technology company whose products, software and services help customers collect and prepare blood and cells, with customers in more than 150 countries, global headquarters in Lakewood, five regional headquarters, eight manufacturing sites and six innovation and development centres; those figures are the company’s own. The same release named Antoinette Gawin as president and chief executive and described the company as a subsidiary of Terumo Corporation.

For a design guide, Terumo BCT shows how a company can carry one short tag through several owners: COBE BCT, Gambro BCT, CaridianBCT and Terumo BCT all kept the same three letters. Compare Terumo, its parent, and Haemonetics, another blood-collection equipment company. For this guide we use a slate blue, a pale mist and a muted red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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