$47.5 million purchase gives United Therapeutics a nearly 300-acre site to expand organ-manufacturing operations
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Overview
Updated 1 hour agoA former Anheuser-Busch brewery in Merrimack, New Hampshire, is becoming an organ-manufacturing site. United Therapeutics, a biotech company that builds 3D-printed organ scaffolds and gene-edited pig organs, paid $47.5 million for the nearly 300-acre property that Anheuser-Busch shut down in December.
The purchase is the company's largest infrastructure bet in the region. It expands United Therapeutics' New Hampshire footprint from an 80,000-square-foot research lab to a 683,000-square-foot industrial complex. That's the scale needed to move organ manufacturing from experimental research toward production.
Why it matters
Organ manufacturing is moving from lab research to production scale, and this former brewery is where that could happen.
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A biotechnology company developing pharmaceuticals and technologies for organ transplantation, including xenotransplantation.
Belgian multinational brewer that owned the Merrimack plant from 1970 until 2026.
Timeline
January 1970 September 2026
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Sale becomes public
Latest AnnouncementBoston.com reports the former brewery's new owner, drawing attention to the organ-manufacturing plans.
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Sale closes to United Therapeutics
AcquisitionBiotech company pays $47.5 million for the 300-acre site with a five-year deed ban on brewing.
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Anheuser-Busch announces Merrimack closure
ClosureAbout 125 workers offered relocation or severance as the brewery shuts down.
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United Therapeutics moves organ group to Manchester
ExpansionCompany relocates organ manufacturing research from Burlington, Vermont to the Millyard.
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Merrimack brewery opens
MilestoneAnheuser-Busch opens its New Hampshire plant on Daniel Webster Highway.
Historical Context
3 moments from history that rhyme with this story — and how they unfolded.
Manchester Millyard: textiles to tech (1935-present)
The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company was the world's largest textile producer, employing 17,000 people in mills along the Merrimack River. It closed in 1935, leaving millions of square feet of empty factory space in the middle of Manchester.
The mills sat largely vacant for decades as the region's textile economy collapsed.
Starting in the 1980s, the Millyard became office and tech space. Dean Kamen's DEKA moved in, and later United Therapeutics established its organ-manufacturing lab there.
This is the same regional pattern: a massive legacy industrial facility repurposed for high-tech manufacturing. The Merrimack purchase is the next chapter in that transformation.
NUMMI plant becomes Tesla's Fremont factory (2010)
The Fremont plant was a joint GM-Toyota facility that built cars for 26 years. Toyota shut it in 2010, and Tesla took over the same year, converting the 5.3-million-square-foot factory into its main EV plant.
Tesla's early years at Fremont were chaotic, with production delays and quality problems.
The plant became the birthplace of the Model S and Model 3. Tesla now produces hundreds of thousands of cars a year there, proving a legacy factory could anchor a new industry.
Like the Fremont plant, the Merrimack facility gives a company a production-scale site for a technology still in its early commercial phase. The parallel suggests ambitious conversions are possible but take years and significant capital.
First gene-edited pig heart transplant (2022)
Surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center implanted a gene-edited pig heart into 57-year-old David Bennett, who was ineligible for a human donor organ. He survived two months before dying of heart failure.
The case proved that genetically modified pig organs can function in a human body, at least temporarily. It sparked debate about the ethics and practicality of xenotransplantation.
United Therapeutics is among the leading companies pursuing regulatory approval for xenotransplantation. The goal is to make organs available on demand rather than on donor availability.
The Merrimack purchase is infrastructure for that goal. Manufacturing organs at scale requires facilities with the space and cleanroom capacity the former brewery provides.
