In Good Form
The start-up PensatechPharma develops new forms of pharmaceuticals
PensatechPharma GmbH is a company specialized on innovative forms of pharmaceuticals. It is now looking for new solutions for difficult types of drug administration at its new location in Adlershof.
Professor Roland Bodmeier is definitely not lost for words and apt formulations. The pharmacist explains the main area of business of his company, which he founded in 2012, with the detailed knowledge of a practiced scientist and the experience of a longstanding university professor. Incidentally, his PensatechPharma GmbH, a spin-off from the Free University (FU) Berlin, is also all about formulations which is what you call the embedding of active agents into a pharmaceutical product. In order to achieve the optimal effect in terms of location, time, and intensity, they have to be administered in a suitable form – they include tablets, pellets, injection, solutions, or patches. This is why these various forms are being continuously improved and developed.
PensatechPharma’s business model rests on two pillars: high-quality service to finance the company, secondly, research and development of innovative pharmaceutical forms. It also rests on Mathias Walther, Mesut Ciper, and Martin Körber, three executives with long-standing experience in the industry – all of whom have PhDs. Bodmeier ascribes his start-up’s economic success to the fact that the relatively small company is able to react swiftly and flexibly to the requirements and wishes of its customers.
The demand for the services offered by the company is growing accordingly. As did the company itself. Meanwhile it has 10 employees working in the brick building in a former perfume factory in Steglitz, today’s FU-Institute for Pharmacy. PensatechPharma is experiencing robust growth without requiring any public subsidies, says Bodmeier, who has an unmistakable Bavarian ring to his voice. The 58-year-old is originally from Munich where he studied pharmacy and wrote his dissertation. He went on working as a lecturer at the University of Texas in Austin, USA, for 8 years before he was appointed as full professor for “Pharmaceutical Technology and Biopharmacy” at FU Berlin.
Besides the service department, the creative potential of the experts at Pensatech is increasingly used for more own developments. One example is pharmaceutical agents, such as cytostatic drugs, that are especially hard to administer, another is to try to reduce possible drastic side effects of certain drugs through a more nuanced formulation. This includes research on new combination drugs. Additional laboratories with high-quality equipment were rented in order to make room for these new activities. These will open at the beginning of 2016 and the staff will be increased to 20 employees in the following years. The main focus is on complex medication such as cytostatic drugs, implants, and depot medication. The up-and-coming company wants to make use of the synergy effects created by the diverse science and technology scene in Adlershof in view of, for example, specific analytical, microbiological, and procedural research questions.
By Paul Janositz for Adlershof Journal