Major investment in bioanalytical services

The Uppsala-based company, Mercodia, born out of a vibrant Life Science environment with a solid, long-standing reputation globally and especially throughout the Nordics as an immunoassay manufacturer and supplier, is now focusing on delivering bioanalytical services. The bioanalytical services are mainly directed toward pharma- and biotech companies and CROs in Europe and North America.

Some of the world’s most famous innovations and products that are used in the Life Science industry daily originally come from Uppsala. The region’s strengths make it attractive for collaborations with other regions, and the companies here are also sought after as collaboration partners for companies in other Life Science clusters.

“We already have strong partnerships with companies in the Medicon Valley region, and we will work even harder to strengthen our relationships in this region. Especially now that we have a strong commercial growth and increase of our bioanalytical service capacity,” says Mercodia’s CEO Jörgen Dahlström.

Creating great advantages for customers

Mercodia’s primary business area from thirty years back is the development, manufacturing, and distribution of ready-made immunoassay kits for research focused on cardiovascular and metabolic diseases such as diabetes. The largest customer group is in the private sector and academia and to some extent hospitals.

Now a major new investment is being made to strengthen the thriving bioanalytical services within Mercodia. Instead of pharma-, and biotech companies performing clinical tests themselves, they send their samples to Mercodia’s laboratory, where specialists efficiently perform the tests and send back complete tailored reports. Services offered include biomarker analysis, assay development and validation, and PK/PD bioanalysis to support the drug development process, from preclinical to clinical stages.

“The biggest advantage for our customers is that they no longer must spend time and capital on learning new methods for testing. It is convenient for them to send their samples to us instead: we perform the bioanalytical tests and thus support larger research projects and/or clinical trials, primarily in drug development,” explains Jörgen Dahlström, and adds:

“We have developed this business area to provide even more support to our customers. During the pandemic, we saw that clinical trials stopped due to not being able to recruit patients. Now, there is a great need to catch up with all the clinical tests that have had to wait. Here, is where our solid bioanalytical service and growing capacity make a significant difference.”

Now is exactly the right time

Mercodia offers both complete kits for customers to perform their own clinical tests, as well as bioanalytical services where the customer can outsource their entire testing operations. It has become the current practice that Pharma and Biotech outsource their bioanalytical testing to specialist companies such as Mercodia.

“If you look at all industries and all businesses, it becomes clear that data is generally more valuable than physical products. With our bioanalytical test services, we deliver data instead of a physical product. Now is exactly the right time to work in that way and it is also a driving force for us in our development of Mercodia as a company. We deliver the data that our customers need to, for example, steer the development of a pharmaceutical project to become a registered drug on the market,” says Dahlström.

Through the new bioanalytical service offer, Mercodia gets a new interface with customers and a larger customer group.

“We need to recruit more staff to run this new venture. Our goal is to grow to double turnover from 2021 to 2026. We see the greatest growth potential in the bioanalysis business. In addition to this investment in Sweden, we are also opening a laboratory in the USA. However, our roots are in Uppsala, as are our core competencies and development department. The operations in the USA are still under construction and are aimed at the American market. For customers in the rest of the world, we rely on our service team here in Uppsala,” Jörgen Dahlström concludes.