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Publication: InternationalReports.net / The Washington Times
Date: November 2002
Title: Catching up with the mind

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.

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