Thermo Fisher Scientific is an American provisioner of scientific instrumentation, reagents and consumables, and software and services to healthcare, life science, and other laboratories in academia, government, and industry (including in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors). Based in Waltham, Massachusetts, Thermo Fisher was created in 2006 by the merger of Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific, to form a company with US$ 9 billion in combined revenues.
The combined company has acquired other reagent, consumable, instrumentation, and service providers, including Life Technologies Corporation in 2013 (for US$ 13.6 billion, for probe reagents and advanced DNA sequencing services), Advanced Scientifics (US$ 300 million, for bioprocessing technologies) and Alfa Aesar (US$ 405 million, for research chemicals), both in 2015; Affymetrix (US$ 1.3 billion, for gene chip technologies) and MTI-GlobalStem (amount unknown, for cell transfection and neurobiology), both in 2016; FEI Company (US$ 4.2 billion, an electron microscope manufacturer), Finesse Solutions (amount unknown, for bioproduction control systems and software), Core Informatics (amount unknown, for cloud-based scientific data management), and Patheon (US$ 7.2 billion, for its contract development and manufacturing services), all in 2017; Becton, Dickinson's Advanced Bioprocessing business in 2018 (amount unknown, for further bioprocessing products); and Brammer Bio in 2019 (US$ 1.7 billion, for gene therapy manufacturing capabilities).
As of 2017, the company had revenues of $21 billion and was a Fortune 500 company. As of 2018, the company employed on the order of 70,000 workers, and was reporting $US 24 billion in annual revenues.
In March 2020, Thermo Fisher received emergency use authorization from the FDA for a test for SARS-CoV-2 to help mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic.