PharmaTelevision - InterMed Discovery: The World's Largest Natural Product Library

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Video title: InterMed Discovery: The World's Largest Natural Product Library

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In this interview Fintan Walton talks to Mr Erik Metz, Head of Business Development at InterMed Discovery - a Natural Product lead discovery company from Dortmund, Germany. Erik Metz explains how InterMed Discovery made use of the assets it brought out of Bayer HealthCare AG to diversify its target market and make its services available to biotech, pharmaceutical, food and cosmetic companies. Having explored the origins of the company he discusses what the future holds for InterMed Discovery, focusing on the company's plans to develop its own therapeutic portfolio either by a strategic partnership or by raising capital independently.

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Company origin and acquiring assets from Bayer HealthCare

Fintan Walton:

Hello and welcome to Pharmaventures business review here live in San Diego California. On this show I have Erik Metz who is head of business development at the company InterMed Discovery based in Dortmund, Germany. Welcome to the show.

Erik Metz:

Thank you.

Fintan Walton:

Erik MetzInterMed Discovery is a company that came of Bayer a couple of years ago when Bayer was undergoing its major restructuring. It came out of the natural product discovery drug discovery unit at Bayer. Tell us what that unit was originally and what was the opportunity? Why was the opportunity there to set up InterMed Discovery?

Erik Metz:

Yes so our group of people working for Bayer healthcare as the global drug discovery unit for Bayer we worked with natural products only so we worked for all the R&D facilities worldwide. Due to reorganizations at that time we lost lot of our internal customers because some of R&D facilities was being closed. So therefore we offered to Bayer the opportunity to do this management buyout and indeed in 2006 we were a new company.

Fintan Walton:

Well so clearly that was a new challenge for those people who were who joined InterMed Discovery at that particular moment and clearly as you say at that time Bayer most of the work going on in that unit were servicing internal Bayer needs. Now you are out on your own you have to do things on your own. So what did you bring what did the management bring out of out of Bayer this great InterMed discovery business?

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Erik Metz

President and Chief Executive Officer

Erik Metz joined InterMed Discovery as Head of Business Development where he has specialised in product development for new applications and has applied his experience in intercultural and multinational communication and business practice. Prior to joining InterMed Discovery Mr Erik Metz worked for several years as Section Head North America at AnalytiCon Discovery where he had key accounts in the pharmaceutical, nutraceutical and cosmetic industries. He has also held the position of Account Development Manager at both Thermo Fisher Scientific and Thermo Electron. Mr Erik Metz gained his academic qualifications from Hogeschool van Amsterdam and HBO University Netherlands.

InterMed Discovery

InterMed Discovery was founded in 2006 in a management buyout of the Natural Products Research Unit of BAYER HealthCare AG. As a Natural Product lead-discovery company, generating novel product candidates for the life science, food and cosmetics industries, it has been able to use its pedigree to draw on over 20 years of Natural Product research. At its foundation the company possessed over 6 patents and since being founded they have initiated work on an additional 5 patents. InterMed Discovery produces proprietary product pipelines of early stage pharmaceuticals and functional ingredients and also has partners in research and lead generation. Biologically characterised product leads are identified using a proprietary bioinformatics platform drawing on screening results compiled over many years. InterMed Discovery adds to this the industry's largest collections of pure compounds, sample fractions and mixtures as its source for potential Natural Product leads. The company is situated in Dortmund, Germany at the BioTech Centre, where its laboratories contain libraries of more than 150,000 screening samples and compounds and production facilities for micro- to multi-gram scales. It currently employs a staff of thirty people, sixteen of whom are dedicated to research.