THERMO FISHER BRINGS THE ELECTRON MICROSCOPE BACK TO ITS BIRTHPLACE AT STRIJP-T

Posted by Bart Brouwers | Jan 25, 2019

With the arrival of Thermo Fisher Scientific, the last spaces in the Innovation Powerhouse at Strijp-T have also been occupied. This week, the signatures were put under the contracts, marking the return of the builder of electron microscopes to the place where product development originally began. As a spinoff of Philips, FEI took its first steps as a young company at Strijp-T. Thermo Fisher paid around 4 billion euros in 2016 for the acquisition of FEI, followed two years later by the acquisition of Phenom-World, which emerged from FEI. It is intended that Thermo Fisher will have moved into the iconic Powerhouse, the former power plant, in three months.

At the new location, Thermo Fisher will mainly focus on the further development of the tabletop models of electron microscopes, which used to come from Phenom-World. These microscopes - 'desktop SEMs' or 'scanning electron microscopy solutions' - are used in quality control and process management in manufacturing industries and are sold worldwide with China as the largest market. Sioux is the main supplier of electronics in these microscopes (also the former owner of Phenom-World until a year ago); NTS is the supplier of the assembled final product.

Two years ago, VanBerlo Design was the first to move into the former power plant at Strijp-T. This was preceded by years of renovation.

Thermo Fisher Scientific has a revenue of over $20 billion and approximately 65,000 employees worldwide. Last year, the company received the prestigious Edison Award 2018 for their electron microscope Krios G3i. As a tribute to the creators, Thermo Fisher brought the Edison Award directly from New York to the place where Krios is developed and produced: Eindhoven. Health scientists looking for better treatment of cancer or Alzheimer's disease use Krios systems to conduct their research.

The researchers working with Thermo Fisher microscopes received two Nobel Prizes: in 2011, Dan Shechtman received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of quasicrystals, and in 2017, Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, and Richard Henderson earned the Nobel Prize for their revolutionary method of visualizing human protein molecules using cryo-electron microscopy.

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