CRADL® & Explora BioLabs: Unified Culture Forms Successful Merger
May 27, 2025
Marie Daghlian
In April 2025, Charles River Accelerator and Development Labs (CRADL®) and Explora BioLabs celebrated the third anniversary of their successful merger, which expanded CRADL®’s ability to enhance the preclinical services it provides. Big4Bio Senior Editor Marie Daghlian sat down with Julie Freebersyser, Executive Director of NA Insourcing Solutions, and Charlie Cook, Senior Director of Operations to discuss the challenges and implications of the merger that have led to its success today.
Big4Bio: Charlie, Julie, thanks for joining us. We are going to explore how the successful merger with Explora BioLabs has led to CRADL®’s ability to provide a seamless and cost-effective preclinical service for researchers. Let’s start with a little background. What were the key drivers behind the merger?
Charlie Cook: Explora BioLabs coined themselves as a contract research group that provided Vivariumas a Service. That meant they ran and operated vivaria that would allow clients to come to their location and rent space and services to execute their in vivo studies and develop new therapeutics for market. Additionally, we provided services in the form of technical and husbandry labor, called OnSite services, to clients with their own vivarium. Explora also had a smaller business offering for clients that wanted outsourced contract research services where we organized and ran studies on their behalf. We were in the markets ofSan Diego, San Francisco, and had moved into the Boston and Seattle markets within the year prior to the acquisition.
Julie Freebersyser: There were strong synergies that attracted us to a potential merger with Insourcing Solutions, Charles River’s vivarium services arm of the business. Through CRADL®, our contract vivarium space, we rent vivarium lab space to clients. For over 30 years, we have also offered a variety of staffing services which were modeled differently than those of Explora. And while it was not part of the CRADL® offering, Charles River’s Discovery team provides fully outsourced study services to researchers on a much larger scale than Explora’s outsourced study services. The merger with Explora BioLabs was attractive for both the existing service synergies for the expanded services and geographies.For example, Charles River didn't have vivarium facilities in San Diego where Explora BioLabs was headquartered, and the geographical expansion was attractive. And because Charles River also provides research models, preclinical services, and safety testing services we have been able to deliver a stronger service portfolio than either company was offering prior.
Big4Bio: Did Charles River approach Explora about a merger?
Julie Freebersyser: Explora was actively in the market looking to be bought and Charles River responded to requests from them that they were looking for a buyer.
Big4Bio: Some acquisitions retain the acquired brand, but did you always plan to integrate the two and can you talk about the integration?
Julie Freebersyser: Yes, we always planned to acquire the brand and integrate it into Charles River. We wanted to make sure—because of some of the synergies in the marketplace—that we could provide a seamless experience to all the clients with the sites and the ecosystem of support and services that we had. The goal was to drive a uniform message across the network so that they would be able to get the same level of customer service and services across all facilities and offerings. It was also important to create operational and supplier alignment for staff and customer experience efficiencies.
We believed that the first step, and really the backbone of integration success was to create a unified culture. The mindset we focused all employees under was that we are all ‘Charles River,’ part of a singular family so that our clients could also experience that same togetherness. And we didn't think we could accomplish that by keeping two different brands. We wanted to take the best from both companies and really come up with something that was better and provided refinements on both sides as a singular unit.
Big4Bio: And how did the integration go? Did the cultures mesh well?
Julie Freebersyser: Did I think it was easy? No, I don't think that any integrations are, and we had to very deliberately think through things and take our time. We wanted to retain as many people as possible. Ensuring clients from both businesses were well taken care of was essential, and so it required a lotof time and effort on everybody's part to manage each change with care. And I always joke that two companies that had synergies like CRADL® and Explora, and looked so similar from the outside, actually operated so differently internally.
We physically brought our teams together to create and roll out a singular mission and vision that they could get behind. And I think that helped drive success despite the challenges we faced as we aligned operations and procedures. It wasn't, “our way versus your way.” It was “how do we build this together?” Charlie, what do you think?
Charlie Cook: I completely agree. The feelings before the full acquisition went through were concern over the differing size of the two companies, and the concern that the larger company was going to come in and just take over and dictate the new way of business. But the experience was very different. To start, CRADL® has more of a small business mindset, just like Explora, and really came with the cultural message that they were not going to dictate how everything was going to run. They instead focused on working together to develop the best of both, and it really set a lot of minds at ease. It was a message of partnership and not a take over and that really allowed us to focus on operational integration. We didn’t have to have the internal struggle of which processes and procedures are going to be in place and how we're going to operate. It was really the coming together of two teams rather than hashing out of things between two teams.
Big4Bio: How long did the integration take?
Julie Freebersyser: We are fully meshed at this point, but it took us a little more than two years. We’ve completed most of the integration. We're still in the process of improving on what we've built together. So, it wasn't just changing the name on a building; it was that inside we are truly operating together.It's never really over because we want to make sure that we're always innovating and reinventing ourselves in responding to what our clients and the market needs.
Charlie Cook: At this point, we're just polishing it and making sure that we're continuously innovating and improving for both our employees and our customers in any way that we can.
Big4Bio: How has the merger benefited clients? What are the top areas that clients have seen the biggest impact?
Julie Freebersyser: One of the biggest things that we did across the board was to create a combined go-to market strategy. As we said before, Explora had different flavors of their services versus what CRADL® offered. And so, this was our ability to combine all the services that we had that were successful at both companies, so that clients across the network in North America could access the full spectrum of services together. I think it helped expand the services that they were able to tap into. It also created standardization of our processes, which allows clients, no matter what site they're at or who they talk to, to get the same great service or the same great answers in terms of our process, and that they can move from one site to another as some clients do without a distinguishable difference in their experience. It's also allowed us to build and invest further in digital infrastructure that we're implementing across the board. The clients benefited, especially on the Explora side, from the other research models, testing, and other services that Charles River is known for. Now Explora clients don't have to go to a different company to find them. They can use one company across the whole R&D pipeline for all the services they need.
Charlie Cook: For the Explora clients, there's definitely been an increase in expertise available to them. And Explora brought over their fractional staffing model that smaller biotechs can utilize, a service that Charles River hadn't offered, so it kind of completes that whole graduation story where you can start off in a CRADL® environment and if you want, graduate to a private operation with our staff as support. So, it really completed that entire growth path for our customers.
Big4Bio: Along with the merger, you've expanded a lot into several new bio hubs. Can you talk about what this type of service means to the ecosystems that the company serves?
Julie Freebersyser: Specifically, the CRADL® turnkey vivarium is in quite a few major hubs now: San Francisco, San Diego, Boston. We're also in Seattle,Thousand Oaks, which is outside of LA, Chicago, and Philadelphia. What we're able to do is help to be a part of that bio hub ecosystem. At some point in time, the new startup companies and new biotechs will be ready to do proof of concept in an in vivo model, and so, having us as part of that ecosystem when they're ready will help to move their ideas and pipeline through, which will allow them to get more investment. So, a lot of the incubators in these bio hubs really depend on our amenities and our services to be able to be part of their maturity as a company that can support success.
Big4Bio: Do you have anything more to say about challenges in this merger between Explora BioLabs and Charles River Insourcing Solutions?
Charlie Cook: I think part of it was geography. It really required a high level of communication and a high level of partnership at all levels of leadership within the two organizations in order to ensure that everything was being communicated in the same way. The technicians all the way up to senior leadership knew where we were going, what we were focusing on, and why we were focusing on it. Having that transparency was key to everyone working towards the same goal. Being so spread out across the country made it more challenging.
Julie Freebersyser: Early on we brought all the people leaders together in SanFrancisco—that was 40 to 50 people--to meet each other. We had a smaller group of people leading different initiatives within the integration and would meet face-to-face periodically to work on the integration together. It could have easily felt very disjointed had we not spent the effort to do all of that.
Then I think the other part, especially for our clients, is making sure we paced the changes in a way that was productive. We didn't want to change things too quickly and then create confusion or challenges. We didn't want to go too slow either because we didn't want clients to feel like we weren't progressing. We wanted to make sure that the business remained successful throughout this process and current business was not derailed.
Big4Bio: Final question, what lessons did you learn from this experience and how will you apply them moving forward in your operations and your offerings at CRADL®?
Charlie Cook: One of the things I learned and found interesting was how two entities that essentially have a very similar product or service can operate so differently. The highlight for me and a lot of people in the organization is that there's no one right way to do it. And so, we need to think outside the box for solutions or even when it comes to current operations that seem to be working. We should continue to innovate and improve because there is potentially another way to do it that is either better for the operation, better for the clients, or better for the science.
Julie Freebersyser: That's a good point, because we weren’t buying a struggling brand. Both companies were successful in their own right. So being able to, as Charlie said, combine efforts and innovate together to hopefully come out better than the two separated. My greatest experience here is that alignment is possible. A culture that is unified and operations that are unified. We have that alignment and we are nimble to change as a result of the integration process. That's the biggest lesson learned by this whole organization from the merger process - that continuous improvement is just going to be a way of life for us now and we embrace that.
Big4Bio: Any final thoughts?
Charlie Cook: As an original member of Explora, I applaud the focus on culture and realize that if you can build and set a culture, it results in positive outcomes in every aspect, not just for the employee and the organization, but for the customer as well. What that has allowed us to do is realize when we go into new markets or open a new site, we really need to lay that groundwork of the culture first in order to have a unified push to market that will ultimately be prosperous for not just us, but the customer as well.
Julie Freebersyser: I agree. Charles River's done a lot of acquisitions and mergers over the years, and the culture can be easily put on the back burner when you first acquire a company or think about go-to market strategy. Often you're thinking about how things are operating internally and how to bring them into the larger fold of the company. And I do think that we can't do the bread and butter of our job if the culture doesn't allow people to feel confident in it.We spent a lot of time on culture. But we knew that we needed todo it in order to drive success. Now when people ask me internally for my advice, one of the things that I give them is to start with the culture first.If everybody's aligned with the same mission and vision and knows what we're supposed to do together, they're going to work to get it done. And then that's going to have a positive impact on everything else.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.