NEW INNOVATORS:ONE OF THE advantages of having a thriving pharmaceuticals sector in Ireland is that it gives indigenous supply companies the opportunity to get their foot in the door with the big multinationals.
Applied Process Consulting (APC) is one such company and despite being just 11 months old, it already has a number of the world’s top 10 pharma companies on its client list.
APC was founded by Prof Brian Glennon and Dr Mark Barrett and is a spin-out from the department of chemical and bioprocess engineering at UCD. The company’s area of specialisation is the manufacturing process and it provides drug companies with customised processing technologies to help them get their products to the global market in a lean, reliable, efficient and cost-effective way.
“The pharmaceutical companies put a huge amount of effort into ensuring that their products are effective and safe. They are less focused on optimising the processes that get these products to market,” explains Glennon. “It would be very expensive for them to have our kind of expertise in-house. It is much better value to buy it in.”
APC is unusual among start-ups in that its technologies were sufficiently developed (as a result of research carried out with the support of Science Foundation Ireland funding) to be commercially applied immediately. This has allowed the company to generate revenue from day one with no requirement for outside investment. As the company grows and expands into overseas markets, however, this may change.
“We had already done the research, so it was a question of converting it into real-life situations and being paid for that expertise,” says Glennon, whose company is based at Nova, UCD’s innovation and technology transfer centre.
“We were able to seize the opportunity because of our familiarity with the needs of the pharmaceuticals sector. We gained this ‘inside’ knowledge through being part of the Solid State Pharmaceutical research cluster, which is a Science Foundation Ireland initiative that brings academics and pharma companies together. Because of the number of international pharmaceutical companies based here, Ireland is unique in being able to support this type of collaboration on this scale.”
APC employs four people full-time, with Glennon and Barrett working part-time with the venture. Both founders had extensive experience in the pharmaceuticals industry before becoming academics. Glennon says the company is on target to employ 20 high-calibre graduates by early 2013
