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Nothing travels faster than the
mind. Within a few seconds we can visualize the
full potential of an idea. Real life, however, has
a tendency to slow down that speed. Radically!
That’s why we are here.
- CMC company motto
Danes have been said to excel at buying something
and improving it to the point that the people they
want to sell it to won’t be able to resist
it. Their edge on biopharmaceuticals is a case in
point. The year 2001, a year of contemplation and
retrenching almost everywhere else in the world,
saw Medicon Valley, a binational network for life
sciences, experience a 30 percent growth in workforce
There are 100 private biotech firms working this
area, doing everything from developing “pens”
for injecting insulin to funding deep research.
One firm found a niche: they can take a promising
looking molecule and get it ready for market. It
is a process that can take up to ten years.
Chemistry Manufacturing Control (CMC) Biopharmaceuticals
is a contract manufacturing organization (CMO).
Founded in 2001, they are already getting ready
to move into bigger headquarters.
CMC blends practical experience from the biopharmaceutical
industry and the industrial enzyme industry. They
are, put very simply, refiners. It’s a service
provider to pharmaceutical companies
The biotech process consists of three different
steps. There is upstream, where the protein is produced,
typically through fermentation. Then the fermentation
is examined for an interesting property, the product
that could be developed.
The downstream part is to get rid of all the water,
biomass, and impurities, to get the specific protein
out of all those hundreds of different components.
After that you would formulate it into a pill –
add some stabilizing components–and turn it
into something humans can use.
Mads Laustsen, president and CEO, is Denmark’s
foremost authority on downstream production. He
has spent 17 years working in laboratories in Denmark
and in the United States. “You can’t learn
this at the school,” he says. “You can
put 25 of the best professors together, and there’s
a good chance it will fail. But if you take people
who have worked with it, people with the right experience,
then you have a collective pool of knowledge. Mix
that with good quality equipment, and not least
the quality systems. That, together, will do it.
“Our business plan is to facilitate the biopharmaceutical
to be a product in the end. We take the interesting
molecules and develop them to the point where you
can give them to humans.”
There is a global bottleneck from discovery to
development, from which the industry has yet to
emerge. “Ninety percent of all pharmaceuticals
are based on chemistry, which is called ‘traditional.’
But because of this mapping of the human genome,
that really changed part of the game, because now
you are able to express complex molecules. Now we
know much more about the proteins of the human body.
But you can’t make them chemically. That’s
the reason there’s a bottleneck. We think that
this will shift to 40 percent in the next ten years.”
“We’re using the same kind of knowledge,
but to build a different business. Novo Nordisk,
for instance, has a lot of their own products, and
they are using their labs. We are working for customers
on contract.”
Lone Fons Schroder, chief business officer and
chief financial officer, who is also the primary
backer of the “Open Mind” concept, stresses
the link between high scientific standards and market
leadership. “The best brains want to work for
market leaders, and good people want to work with
good people. So we have had from the beginning very
high standards. It’s all linked together. We
are letting the company harvest from our expertise.”
Asked about the effect of the EU presidency on
their firm, Schroder thought that it would be minimal,
but positive.
“It’s so funny with the EU, when you
are with a global company suddenly EU is putting
on limits. But sports events have perhaps a bigger
effect. In 1992 we were world soccer champs and
it was so good to go around Europe like that. People
wanted to do business with you.”
As this supplement goes to press, CMC signed a
strategic partnership agreement with H. Lundbeck
to develop and manufacture the active ingredients
used in new protein-based drugs developed by Lundbeck.
For more information, please visit: www.cmcbiotech.com
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