MARLBOROUGH — General Electric Co. isn’t anybody’s idea of a scrappy upstart. But the giant company hopes its life sciences division, one of its fastest-growing niche businesses, will play the role of industry disruptor as the manufacturing of biotech drugs shifts from big-batch production toward more flexible systems.
GE Life Sciences, which is building a $27 million US headquarters campus here, was never a giant in the market for the large stainless steel tanks, called bioreactors, that biotechnology companies traditionally used to produce therapies from living cells.
But since purchasing Marlborough-based Xcellerex Inc. in 2012, it has been aiming to become a leader in the “single-use” production systems — deploying disposable liners to make drugs in smaller batches — that are becoming increasingly popular among biopharma companies and contract manufacturers that produce biotech drugs.
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Its roster of products includes a prefabricated “pop-up” factory, ideal for biotech production in cash-strapped developing countries. The business plans to set up the first one in China over the coming year.
Those modular facilities cost between $60 million and $80 million apiece, a fraction of the $300 million to $800 million price of a traditional bioprocessing plant. Such sites would typically contain single-use production systems, support equipment, and analytics software.
“We come at this from a total systems approach,” Kieran Murphy, the London-based president and chief executive of GE Life Sciences, said in an interview.
GE Life Sciences is also developing separate production systems and tools for the emerging fields of cell and gene therapy, which involve engineering and modifying human cells to cure diseases. The fields are so new that production processes are still being developed, but GE Life Sciences executives see enormous potential for growth over the coming decade.
“It’s a very large market,” said Cindy Collins, the division’s local site leader.
While biotech drug revenues total $250 billion annually, sales of cell therapies add up to less than $100 million. But with many promising cell therapies under development in Massachusetts and elsewhere, the market is expected to expand rapidly.
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A part of the GE Healthcare business group accounting for $4 billion in annual sales, the life sciences division has more than 11,000 employees in more than 100 countries. About 225 scientists and business people are working out of temporary space off Interstate 495 here until they can move into their new headquarters, 210,000 square feet of space currently under construction. Another 100 employees work at a separate Marlborough site acquired from Xcellerex.
In addition, GE Life Sciences expects 50 to 70 employees will move here from a pair of New Jersey sites, in Piscataway and Princeton, where the company is reducing operations.
Along with other hires, the company expects to have more than 500 employees here by the end of next year.
“There’s such a center of gravity [for life sciences] in the Boston area that it seemed a natural place for us to gravitate to,” Murphy said.
Bioprocessing is the division’s largest and fastest-growing market. But it faces formidable competitors, including Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. in Waltham and EMD Millipore, a German company that has its global headquarters in Billerica, as well as Danaher Corp., a Washington, D.C., firm that recently agreed to buy rival Pall Corp.
GE Life Sciences is also building franchises in medical diagnostics, including contrasting agents used in X-rays and in-vitro diagnostics. That business includes the Clarient Diagnostic Services laboratory in Aliso Viejo, Calif., which performs cancer and molecular diagnostic testing.
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Robert Weisman can be reached at robert.weisman@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeRobW.