On the company's second birthday in April 2003, Scienion, a complex provider of biochip products, hardware and services, announces a strong increase in turnover as compared to the previous year
"The company's development is continuously positive," claims founder and chairman Holger Eickhoff, "and has achieved broad market acceptance through its integrated concept of technology, product portfolio, hardware, consulting and services".
Just a few months after the company started in Berlin as a spin-off of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, in spring 2001 Scienion launched its first products: customer-specific and subject-related DNA and protein biochips.
"The biotechnology market is on thin ice, but there is a growing market for good products, and customers are willing to pay for reliable quality," Eickhoff is confident.
With its own technology platform, the company can guarantee this quality and offer its customers the capability to analyse all substances on one platform, from DNA and proteins, to antibodies, all the way to chemicals.
Adding the hardware for biochips division several months ago has paid off.
Thanks to this division, even those Scienion solutions which integrate chip know-how and drop-on-demand technology can be established for every customer who would like to build up capacities for chip manufacture.
With the Sciflexarrayer, an in-house innovation, Scienion responded to customers' wishes for a highly flexible, modularly constructed and extremely precise solution for the efficient manufacture of biochips in small batches in their own laboratories.
The open, modular system also opens up previously inconceivable possibilities in the areas of proteomics and secondary screening, which are undergoing continuous further development at Scienion.
Complete solutions and all-round service, one-stop shopping for everything concerning array experiments - for Scienion customers from academic research, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, this means that all steps from project planning, to design and manufacture of biochips, all the way to the analysis and evaluation of the data, can be delegated to the 26 current staff members in Berlin-Adlershof.
CEO Eickhoff emphasises a market advantage: "Here customers also profit from know-how in our network of partners from research institutions like the MPI and universities, and companies in the industry like Agowa, MicroDiscovery, Conaris, Protagen and Invitek".
Despite the overall bleak economic situation, at Scienion the plan is to keep growing, "such that we are closely oriented to the market.
"That means first of all," Eickhoff explains, "taking care of the production of the biochip products already on the market and in demand in the short term".
But for Scienion the vision of personalised medicine is omnipresent as well: developing microarrays with which individual diagnostics and therapy can be achieved for today's major diseases like rheumatism, asthma, cardiovascular conditions and brain ailments.
In the long term, the multidisciplinary Scienion team would like to use its biochip platform to take advantage of the interactions of biomolecules, to optimize screening of medicines and to develop efficient diagnostics equipment.
"We would like to network even more intensively with companies in Berlin to form internationally competitive consortia for the solution of major medical problems in the pharmaceutical industry".
