Maybe you take a couple of different prescription medications. If you don't now, chances are that as you get older, you will. And the interaction between drugs can be a wild card. That's where
Absorption Systems rides in like a pharmaceutical cavalry. Based in Exton, the privately held company is a pioneer in the field of pharmacokinetics. As CEO Patrick Dentinger explains, there are two areas of preclinical drug research: pharmacodynamics, or what a drug does to your body, and pharmacokinetics, which is what your body does to the drug. The latter is Absorption Systems' specialty. "The FDA has gotten tougher in trying to understand what a drug does when it hits your body," says Dentinger. The company researches the path that singular and multiple meds take through the body.
In a series of buildings filled with lab coated technicians and millions of dollars of equipment, Absorption Systems is big pharma's first stop on the way to developing a drug that will eventually go to market, perhaps a decade down the line. Many compounds don't even make it out of the research phase, and Dentinger reports that most of the time, pharmaceutical clients do not share the purpose of the proposed drug, just the chemical compound.
Once a compound is submitted to Absorption System's lab, it goes through rigorous testing involving human tissue to simulate the interaction. Absorption Systems grows intestine, liver and skin cells, and out of a scene from the classic Woody Allen film Sleeper, the company has even used human noses (harvested from cadavers) to measure the way a molecule does or doesn't get into a body.
"The industry has changed in general," explains Dentinger, who describes formerly high walls of privacy surrounding pharmaceutical research crumbling in recent years with outsourcing to biotech startups and contract research organizations (CROs) like Absorption.
While Dentinger, whose sole partner is Ismael Hidalgo, does not disclose details of the privately held company's revenue, Absorption Systems is certainly growing, with over 200 customers and 115 employees, a satellite lab in San Diego and direct interaction with the FDA. The company hopes its future proprietary data collection technology can revolutionize the way all scientific research is documented and potentially create a spinoff company.
Source: Patrick Dentinger, Absorption Systems
Writer: Sue Spolan