Introducing Cytiva: GE plans name change ahead of $21bn Danaher buy

GE Healthcare’s Biopharma business has announced plans to change its name and logo in anticipation of its acquisition by Danaher Corporation later this year.

“On February 25 our lives changed,” Dodi Axelson, head of Communications, Life Sciences at GE Healthcare told Bioprocess Insider. She spoke, of course, about the agreement by Danaher Corporation to acquire the BioPharma portion of GE Healthcare’s Life Sciences business for a cash price of $21.4 billion (€19.4 billion).

The deal is still under regulatory review and expected to close in the fourth quarter, but this week the firm has announced the acquired business unit will be renamed ‘Cytiva’ with a logo nicknamed ‘The Drop.’

The Drop: GE Life Science’s new logo to accompany new name ‘Cytiva.’ Image c/o the GE

The name and logo will not be officially used until the deal’s closure, but the announcement shows the firm is “transaction ready,” according to Axelson.

When asked if is premature to announce new names and logos when a deal is yet to close – often a name along the lines of NewCo will be used as a placeholder – Axelson described the act as “producing good homework” as the firm has told  customers about this ahead of time to ensure minimum changes in their regulatory procedures.

Name and logo change

The name was selected from a list of around 5,000 potentials and comes from ‘cyto,’ which means ‘cell’ in Greek, and ‘iva,’ a Latin suffix meaning ‘doing’ and ‘capable of.’

“Together, Cytiva matches what our customers told us – that we are different from competitors because of expertise and that we help them advance their work,” the company states in its literature. “Everything our customers do, in some way or another, relates to the use, growth or analysis of cells or their parts.

According to Axelson, Cytiva was also the name of a former product from GE’s research portfolio consisting of live human heart cells used by pharma companies in toxicology studies.

Meanwhile ‘The Drop’ logo is another callback, having first been designed for Pharmacia in 1966. The defunct firm produced chromatography resins and downstream equipment from a site in Uppsala, which now serves as GE’s largest Life Sciences site and continues to produce bioprocess tools and technologies.

Wily-eyed readers may have seen the logo used more recently as in 2002 it was used as the downstream bioprocess category logo for GE’s ÄKTA, HiTrap, and Sephadex products, then expanded as a product category logo for GE’s single-use portfolio in 2008, before being dropped except in key chromatography categories in 2010.

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