Serologicals Corp.’s Lawrence plant is poised to deliver 1,650 liters of Ex-Cyte to some of the world’s largest pharmaceuticals companies, a company executive said Thursday.

And while there’s plenty more Ex-Cyte where that came from — the plant is equipped to pump out 110,000 liters of the cell-growth liquid a year — it won’t be coming anytime soon.

Demand for the product is expected to remain flat in 2005, said Bud Ingalls, the company’s vice president for finance and chief financial officer, but the company is counting on the Lawrence plant to fill additional orders in the years ahead.

“It will take a while,” Ingalls said Thursday, as the company reported financial results for 2004. “But the message is that we’ve seen good demand from our customers into the future. We’ve now gotten five-year forecasts from our large customers, and the Lawrence plant is clearly going to be needed to meet our customer demand.”

Atlanta-based Serologicals reported that sales of Ex-Cyte reached $29.6 million in 2004, up from $29.3 million a year earlier — and far from the Lawrence plant’s capability to produce as much as $60 million worth of the liquid, which is drawn from serum of slaughtered cattle and transformed into material that helps speed the growth of cells needed to research and create new drugs.

The $28 million Lawrence plant is operating with 26 employees, whose work has produced the first 1,650 liters of Ex-Cyte. Now customers — pharmaceuticals companies and other biotech operations — will check to see that the golden liquid meets their needs before the plant’s products move into the wider market.

Such validation and engineering processes — all conducted under budget — are expected to be completed by the end of May, company officials have said.

“We have … demonstrated that the final product meets both our internal as well as our customer specifications,” said David Dodd, Serologicals’ president and chief executive officer, in a statement Thursday.

Overall, Dodd said, the company reported increased revenues and profits across all business units as the company “saw a remarkable transformation of Serologicals into becoming a truly global life sciences company focused on all aspects of the biomedical pipeline, from drug discovery through bio-manufacturing.”

Excluding the amortization and other acquisition-related costs, Serologicals said, earnings from continuing operations in 2004 were $24.7 million, or 79 cents per share, compared with $18.8 million, or 71 cents per share, a year earlier.

The results exclude the “substantial” cash and other charges and tax benefits from the company’s acquisitions of Chemicon, AltaGen BioSciences and Upstate Group Inc. and resulting integrations into Serologicals’ operations, the company said.