Cologne, July 9, 2009 - DIREVO Industrial Biotechnology GmbH announced today that it has completed the move to new premises of its own at the BioCampus Cologne. This is another important step in building up the company to figure as a major player in industrial biotechnology. It was further announced that DIREVO is dedicating its core laboratory to its co-founder and shareholder, Nobel Prize laureate Prof. Dr. Manfred Eigen. His scientific discoveries and inventions laid the foundations for DIREVO’s technology platform.
“I would like to say thank you to all the people who have made this happen in such a short period of time: my colleagues, all the external professionals involved, our landlord Rhein Estate, and our shareholders,” said DIREVO CEO Dr. Thomas von Rüden at the inauguration ceremony yesterday. “Also, I am very grateful and immensely pleased that Nobel Prize laureate Prof. Manfred Eigen has agreed to the use of his name for DIREVO’s screening facility,” he continued. “It is a remarkable honor for us.”
Prof. Heinrich Schulte, chairman of the Board, added: “On behalf of the Advisory Board and the shareholders I would like to express our compliments and thanks to the entire team at DIREVO Industrial Biotechnology GmbH for this outstanding achievement. We are convinced that we have well invested our money and we expect that the new premises lay the ground for an exceptional company development like with the parent company DIREVO Biotech AG!”
DIREVO Industrial Biotechnology GmbH was founded in July 2008 as a spin-out from DIREVO Biotech AG and sold in September 2008, just prior to the acquisition of the parent company by Bayer HealthCare AG. Since then DIREVO has built its own, proprietary ultra-high-throughput screening facility. The new and further improved platform is able to handle up to 150,000 individual screenings per day. This unrivaled number makes it an extremely powerful tool for the screening of customized enzymes and strains with improved characteristics.
The technology behind this unique device was transferred from DIREVO Biotech AG (now BayerScheringPharma) and the former colleagues there have provided significant and valuable support in setting up DIREVO´s new platform. The Company has now a total staff of 40 superbly trained and highly motivated individuals. Successful collaborations with Danisco/Genencor and Nestlé round off a very successful first year.
For photographs of the opening ceremony please follow this link: http://www.direvo.com/page2.asp?PageID=675
About DIREVO Industrial Biotechnology GmbH
DIREVO Industrial Biotechnology GmbH was founded in 2008 as a spin-out of former DIREVO AG´s Industrial Biotechnology business unit and AC Biotec GmbH. It provides customized solutions via the development and optimization of biocatalysts using its proprietary ultra-high-throughput screening platform.
Serving the Feed&Food industries and chemical/biorefinery businesses, products are developed either independently or in conjunction with global leaders such as Danisco/Genencor and Nestlé. Initial products from DIREVO´s enzyme optimization facility have already gone on the market.
DIREVO Industrial Biotechnology GmbH is privately owned and located in Cologne, Germany. The shareholders include Wölbern Private Equity Partner GmbH (Hamburg), NRW Bank (Düsseldorf), TVM-Capital (Munich), Danisco A/S (Copenhagen), a private equity firm affiliated with Sparkasse KölnBonn (Cologne), SandersMorrisHarris EnzymesLLC (New York), Mulligan BioCapital (Hamburg), and several private investors, including Nobel Prize laureate Prof. Dr. Manfred Eigen and the management of DIREVO itself. More information is available at: www.direvo.com.
About Manfred Eigen
Prof. Dr. Dr. hc. mult. Manfred Eigen, born 1927, was the first to measure „immeasurably fast” chemical reactions by his development of chemical relaxation. He revolutionized our knowledge of chemical reaction kinetics and mechanisms. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1967. From chemistry he turned to biology and developed the ideas of quasispecies, the hypercycle and many others as basic concepts to understand the origin of life and biological evolution. He invented the strategy of directed evolution of proteins and enzymes for application in chemical and pharmaceutical industry. This knowledge was his intellectual investment as a co-founder of Evotec AG and later, but with outstanding success, of DIREVO Biotech AG, the parent company of DIREVO Industrial Biotechnology GmbH, in which Prof. Eigen is a shareholder.
