NEWS FROM HARRO HÖFLIGER  

“In the Swiss phar­ma­ceu­tical market the trend goes towards small batches“

Gen­eral Man­ager Roberto Zürcher and Sales Man­ager Jan Paet­zold tell us what the future of the Swiss phar­ma­ceu­tical and med­ical market looks like. When was the loca­tion near Basel estab­lished? Zürcher: Uhlmann Höfliger Schweiz GmbH has been existing since 2005. It was the first sales and ser­vice com­pany that Harro Höfliger founded together with Uhlmann and […]

Gen­eral Man­ager Roberto Zürcher and Sales Man­ager Jan Paet­zold tell us what the future of the Swiss phar­ma­ceu­tical and med­ical market looks like.

When was the loca­tion near Basel established?

Zürcher: Uhlmann Höfliger Schweiz GmbH has been existing since 2005. It was the first sales and ser­vice com­pany that Harro Höfliger founded together with Uhlmann and thus an impor­tant pio­neer for the Excel­lence United alliance, which was estab­lished six years later. At that time we started with two people, later a ser­vice tech­ni­cian joined us. Mean­while we are seven col­leagues at the site.

What char­ac­ter­izes the phar­ma­ceu­tical market in Switzerland?

Paet­zold: The phar­ma­ceu­tical industry has changed con­sid­er­ably in recent years. Sup­pliers have relo­cated their mass pro­duc­tion of rel­a­tively easy to man­u­fac­ture prod­ucts to other coun­tries. In Switzer­land, the focus is increas­ingly on “small volume & high value prod­ucts”. This means that com­plex powder filling tech­nolo­gies, small batches and devel­op­ment projects involving highly com­plex prod­ucts such as pens, autoin­jec­tors or wear­able pumps are our daily busi­ness these days. 

With our con­sulting, device and phar­ma­ceu­tical ser­vices, we sup­port start-ups and small com­pa­nies in quickly building up know-how in order to develop devices. We also help large com­pa­nies to launch new prod­ucts as quickly as possible.

For Roberto Zürcher (left) and Jan Paet­zold, the future lies in per­son­al­ized medicine.

What does the changeover to small batches mean for Harro Höfliger?

Zürcher: The focus on small batches places new demands on our machines. It is no longer impor­tant how fast a machine can run, but how flex­ibly it can be retro­fitted for batch sizes from 10 to 200 pieces. In the med­ical field, too, devel­op­ment due to per­son­al­ized med­i­cine is increas­ingly moving towards small batches.

One extreme example is cell and gene therapy, where a drug is pro­duced for just one person. That requires the patient’s blood to be taken, mod­i­fi­ca­tion of cer­tain cells and sub­se­quent re­injection. These are one-off ther­a­pies that can com­pletely cure dis­eases and spare the patient a life­time of med­ica­tion. The large phar­ma­ceu­tical com­pa­nies located in Switzer­land are already working inten­sively on this new form of therapy.

Where do you see fur­ther growth potential?

Paet­zold: Although Switzer­land is a country with high wages, there are still many com­pa­nies in the med­ical sector that map processes man­u­ally, because the processes involving implants or sur­gical instru­ments are simply very com­pli­cated. New tech­nolo­gies will enable us to auto­mate processes that until now were regarded as impos­sible to auto­mate. As an example, today we have camera sys­tems with deep learning soft­ware that allow us to iden­tify things that were con­sid­ered unde­tectable only yesterday.

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Photos: Adobe Stock/Eva Bocek