> Thomas Rothmann, Director R&D

Dr. Thomas Rothmann studied Biology at the Technical University in Darmstadt (Germany) and at the University of East Anglia (UK). After his diploma thesis he moved to Heidelberg and worked as a PhD student at the Institute for Applied Tumor Virology within the German National Cancer Center. After a short PostDoc period he joined QIAGEN in 1998 to work as a scientist in the R&D department responsible for the development of automated applications. Later he took over Project Manager and Group Manager responsibilities within the R&D Department to launch several automated systems and applications within the BioRobot® product family. Beginning 2007 Dr. Thomas Rothmann took over the responsibility to setup the R&D competence center “Integrated Microsystems for Sample and Assay Technologies” for QIAGEN.

Could you in few words present QIAGEN to our readers?

QIAGEN is the leading provider of innovative sample and assay technologies. Our products are considered standards in areas such as pre-analytical sample preparation and assay solutions in research for molecular diagnostics, applied testing, pharmaceutical and academic research. We have developed a comprehensive portfolio of more than 500 proprietary, consumable products and automated solutions for sample collection, nucleic acid and protein handling, separation, and purification and open and target specific assays. QIAGEN’s products are sold to academic research markets, to leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, to applied testing customers (such as in forensics, veterinary, biodefense and industrial applications) as well as to molecular diagnostics laboratories. QIAGEN employs more than 2,800 people worldwide. Our products are sold through a dedicated sales force and a global network of distributors in more than 50 countries.

We have a broad portfolio of molecular diagnostic assays, including 30 CE-labelled assays and the only molecular diagnostic test for the human papillomavirus, the primary cause for cervical cancer, which has both CE and FDA approval.

 

What are the main applications your company focuses on now, and in the future?

QIAGEN is a technology leader in sample and assay applications. In other words, our technologies enable customers to retrieve information from biomolecules as DNA, RNA and proteins, which in turn enables them to conduct an array of analytic tests for research.

-Sample technologies: It all starts with the sample. For example, genetic material must be extracted from a biological sample and be specifically processed, before users in academia and industry can read, modify or further process it. QIAGEN is the world’s leading provider of technologies and products for the isolation and preparation of DNA, RNA and proteins.

-Assay technologies are used to make rare target material in samples, such as genetic material, visible. QIAGEN offers a broad range of such assay technologies which are also optimized for use with QIAGEN’s sample technologies.

Our applications start with a biological sample (blood, urine, cell specimens, etc) and the need of our customers to get information from “inside” these cell samples – from the cell RNA, DNA and/or Protein. With molecular biological methods, QIAGEN’s sample and assay technologies enable our customers to get the needed inside information from a variety of approaches. Depending on the biological sample and the biomolecule of interest, this may mean that (1) QIAGEN reagents are used to stabilize the biomolecule at the time of collection (e.G. PAX Blood RNA), or (2) that QIAGEN products provide the means (chemical, enzymatic, mechanical) to release the biomolecule from the biological container (e.G. plant roots, bone or hard to lyse bacteria), or (3) that our reagent systems concentrate and/or purify the biomolecule of interest. QIAGEN products span multiple business applications. For customers in pharma research, for example, QIAGEN products are employed to help assess if a drug is working. In molecular diagnostic applications, QIAGEN technologies can inform if a pathogen has infected a patient. In applied testing/forensic applications, QIAGEN technologies can assess if the genetic profile of the suspect and the murder is identical. In this way, the same technology platform can support different applications for different customer segments. Automation of processes and applications is becoming more and more important for us. The main drivers for automation we see are at one side the increase in sample numbers in centralized settings and on the other side the need for easy-to-use systems as our applications disseminate into decentralized settings (as small hospitals, physicians office or police station) where the operators are less trained and the results are needed immediately. For the diagnostic market segment, the term “Point-of-Care” is used to describe the respective decentralized application setting with the longer term vision to have the application performed next to the bedside of the patient.

 

What are according to you the key requirements for these applications?

Ultimately, our products must enable our customers to produce results. QIAGEN creates technologies for three primary markets: (1) Life Sciences (academic, biotech and pharmaceutical research), (2) Applied Testing (forensics, veterinary diagnostics & bio-defense applications), and (3) Molecular Diagnostics (human infectious disease testing). We aim to customize and apply our technology platforms across these uniquely different applications. For example, similar sample and assay technology platforms may be applied very differently in a forensics lab than in an academic research lab. We see it as our key expertise to leverage our proprietary underlying sample and assay technologies and configure our products to meet unique customers’ applications. A researcher in the lab, a laboratorian in a small hospital and a physician in his office will have quite different requirements for the same molecular test. We aim to provide not just a best-in-class testing technology, but also a solution that “fits” our different customer segments.

 

What does it means in term of technology and future products?

As a technological driven company we aim to provide the best-in-class sample and assay technologies. Importantly, as we have different segments of customers across our business (life sciences, applied testing, molecular diagnostic), we provide the capabilities to configure our technology platforms for specific customer application settings.

Automation and integration of technology platforms is key. Automation brings speed and convenience to our products and customers, and integration assures that QIAGEN platforms can be adopted across an entire workflow process – not just one component of a larger process. When we screen sample and assay technologies we also rate them for their integration and automation capability right from the beginning. Microfluidics opens now a new perspective to our sample and assay technologies with respect to integration capabilities which have not been available before.

 

Will microfluidics be part of these developments?

Yes, microfluidics plays an integral part in our design and development pipeline. Here microfluidics is not seen by itself as a standalone product technology for us but more as an enabling technology to configure our products to meet certain market needs. As classical robotic instrumentation has been and still is an enabling technology to configure our sample and assay technologies to meet our customers needs in certain application settings, this holds especially true for microfluidics in the future (as for example in “Point of Care” application settings). Also robotic instrumentation and microfluidics as enabling integration concepts do not necessarily mutually exclude each other within a product configuration. They may also be used synergistically to allow superior and scalable integration concepts which finally will support the dissemination of our sample and assay technologies into various application settings. Overall we believe that microfluidics can enable us to make our products more productive in the hands of our customers and to ultimately ensure that our customers get their jobs done more efficiently.