GeminiBio is growing its operations in two locations in West Sacramento as the company expands from making products for research applications to also making products for commercial applications.
GeminiBio manufactures cell culture media, growth factors and custom media and bioprocess liquids for the cell and gene therapy market in clean room conditions.
The 35-year-old company began selling into the biological manufacturing industry about four years ago, and those customers have more stringent requirements than the research customers, CEO Brian Parker told the Business Journal.
The company is also dramatically increasing production. It currently uses 1,000-liter vessels to make its products, and it is adding two 10,000-liter vessels and one 5,000-liter vessel at its existing 25,000-square-foot building at 920 Stillwater Road.
Meanwhile, in the same office park, the company is also upgrading a newly leased 32,000-square-foot warehouse building on Reed Avenue into a controlled environment storage facility. That warehouse currently has no environmental controls, and the company is adding temperature control and clean rooms to the building, along with refrigerated areas and freezer areas that can be maintained at minus 20 degrees, said Rob Perry, chief science officer.
The investment is many millions of dollars each into both buildings, Parker said. The level of investment is proprietary, he said. The company sells products globally.
The Stillwater building alone has a building permit for $5 million, according to city records, and that doesn’t include the value of equipment.
The building on Reed Avenue also allows the company to segregate its cell-culture products manufactured with animal components from the bioprocess liquid products that don't include animal components, Parker said. That is a designation that wasn’t so important for products for research, but it is a requirement for commercial products, he said.
The company has 85 employees, Parker said. He declined to disclose its annual revenue.
GeminiBio was founded locally in 1985, and for several decades has been majority-owned by Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based health care private equity firm BelHealth Investment Partners LLC, which has more than $500 million in assets under management through six portfolio companies, according to its website.
GeminiBio operates much of its manufacturing under ISO 7 controls, which are standards set by the Switzerland-based International Organization for Standardization.
The company last did a major expansion in 2020. The space at Stillwater is twice the size of the old facility, but it allowed the company to quadruple its production capacity.
