Merck Serono creates second company under EPP

Merck Serono, a division of Germany’s Merck KGaA (MRK: DE), has established Quartz Bio, the second spin-off company resulting from its Entrepreneur Partnership Program (EPP) launched in April 2012, part of a 30 million-euro ($37.8 million) commitment to support the creation of spin-off and start-up companies focused on continuing activities and compounds that originated at Merck Serono, whose Geneva, Switzerland headquarters have been closed (The Pharma Letter April 24).

Quartz Bio will offer biomarker data management and exploratory biomarker analysis services for the pharmaceutical industry. Biomarker analysis is a critical step in the drug development process as it enables the identification of patient profiles that are most responsive to a given treatment.

"This second company creation through our Entrepreneur Partnership Program shows the great diversity of activities that can be developed in the field of life sciences. Highly specialized service companies are essential actors of the drug-development process, and they are very complementary to the activities and structures of large pharmaceutical companies," said François Naef, chairman of the board of Merck Serono.