Wall Street Reporter presents Origenis

Munich, Germany, July 2006 - Dr. Michael Thormann, Managing Director and Co-Founder, talks about Origenis in an interview with Wall Street Reporter (WSR).

WSR: How large is the overall market Origenis is targeting?
THORMANN: According to a recent market survey, the market for contract research in drug discovery alone exceeds USD$12 billion a year. The trend is towards growth at a rate of between 8% and 12% a year. Since R&D focuses more towards outsourcing, we believe we are in a good market position.

WSR: Tell us a little about Origenis’ product offerings.
THORMANN: We have an integrated multi-disciplinary process called MOREsystem, which allows us to be 200 times faster than the conventional hit-to-lead pharma approach. We offer creative services for drug design, synthesis and characterization, and we deliver patentable pre-clinical compounds with indication-optimized properties. This cuts time to market by up to two years. MOREsystem is our proprietary technology platform that adapts flexibly to virtually any target class, therapeutic area and indication. It allows the direct exploitation of more than a trillion distinct compounds not accessible by any other method. We can synthesize every selected compound of these immense chemical spaces in a straightforward synthetic route, resulting in more patentable drug candidates in much less time. MOREsystem is fully-integrated in terms of molecular design, chemistry, biology, data handling and logistics, interlinked with creative algorithms, resulting in a fast process that can follow multiple hypotheses while reducing human error. It produces the lead compounds by tailoring compound properties towards their desired therapeutic use right from the project start. Origenis’ customizable multi-parametric optimization ensures that most preclinical requirements are met, resulting in a reduction of expensive and time-consuming MedChem modifications. MOREsystem produces optimized lead compound series in a direct approach. This shortcut results in a lower attrition rate, compared to the common multi-stage drug discovery with hit finding, hit validation, hit-to-lead, and lead optimization. Research time and costs are reduced.

WSR: Give us an example of an existing customer and their value proposition in choosing Origenis.
THORMANN: We have two types of customers - the pharma industry and the classical biotech companies. There are pharma industry companies with strengths in development and marketing of drugs who want to fill their pipelines - we can meet their needs with highly-optimized innovative compounds and secured intellectual property. The classical biotech companies identify and validate new targets to tackle certain diseases. They need to span the gap from target to development to move up the value chain - we can fill this chemical research gap in a highly-customizable manner.

WSR: What is unique about Origenis?
THORMANN: Origenis replaces unpredictable Serendipity by a direct process that has been delivering repeatedly.
Origenis has a robust technology platform that yields new chemical entities faster. Our approach optimizes towards multi-parametric compound profiles that are defined a priori. We exploit chemical spaces containing trillions of unexplored potential drug candidates. Fulfilling this task requires us to integrate established concepts of drug discovery in a novel virtual pharma approach. The projection of the drug discovery problem to virtual reality enables us to drive 200 rounds of project-oriented decision making and optimization per day. Our unique interfaces from virtual pharma to our lab capabilities enable the direct chemical synthesis and biological characterization of such compound families in just a few days.

WSR: What about strategic partnerships and alliances and the strategies behind them?
THORMANN: Our confidentiality agreements and research contracts do not allow us to disclose the strategies behind our partnerships – however, several of the top ten pharma companies have used our MOREsystem.

WSR: What are some of the major trends affecting Origenis, and how is the company capitalizing on them?
THORMANN: In the past few years, there has not been a single blockbuster drug. Therefore, market pressure is constantly increasing. Creative technologies are required to fill the drying out drug development pipelines with innovative compounds. No Research development-only companies (NRDOs) increase the need for high-quality patentable compounds ready to enter drug development. Biotech companies identify and validate new targets representing potential opportunities for drug development. Our technology is fully scalable and can work on various targets with different goal settings. The output represents an objective measure for the drugability of the targets and enables fact-based decision making on which target to approach first. We can deliver patentable developable compounds on-demand in a very short timeframe. Finally, the increasing trend towards outsourcing of services is positively influencing our core business.

WSR: Tell us about some of the highlights from the most recent quarter.
THORMANN: The market accepted our solid technology platform and appreciated our high-quality creative services. In our current collaborations, our technology has been delivering positive results at great speed.

WSR: What is Origenis’ outlook for the remainder of the fiscal year?
THORMANN: The consolidation of the company. We’re in the process of building up a strong financial background to secure our operations and lay the foundation for organic growth. This includes our move to bigger state-of-the-art facilities in the Munich biotech region to enable a broader application of our technology.

WSR: What key goals and strategies is the company focusing on?
THORMANN: Our goal is to form long-term strategic alliances with drug development companies as well as being the partner of choice for biotech companies. We want to increase our technological advantages. We constantly develop and adopt our MOREsystem to meet emerging development needs.

WSR: How would the next two to three years be categorized for the company?
THORMANN: We want to achieve quality leadership in our core business - creative services for drug design synthesis and characterization. We believe we will succeed in this task.

WSR: Does the investment community fully understand the company? Are there any misnomers or any misconceptions that still need to be cleared up?
THORMANN: We have only gone out to the investment community with our private placement, which was only done recently. Investors must understand that Origenis is not a virtual company, but a fully-integrated one. While we are employing virtual techniques to save time, to ensure consistent use 
of knowledge, and to reduce human error, we deliver real value: preclinical compounds and intellectual property rights. This reduces financial risk on investments, through the reduced time it takes to market drugs.

WSR: In closing, why should investors get involved with Origenis?
THORMANN: Our business is built on a rock solid proprietary and scalable technology platform that generates products situated up high in the pharmaceutical value chain. Biotech investments most often fund new technologies or their application for the identification or validation of new disease-relevant biological targets. Origenis has the technology and people to create new chemical entities (NCEs) for these targets and helps partners and investors to move up the value chain towards drug development.         

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