iNovacia said the expansion was reflecting its "success in gainingcompetitive strength." Since March, the firm has had two new contracts, which represents an extra 200,000 compounds.
Compound storage modules form the base of the firm's sample handling systemand its own compound library includes around 285,000 discrete compounds.
The compound storage modules, manufactured by TTP LabTech, offer iNovacia an affordable and scaleable method of cherry-picking microtubes from anylocation within a sample library with high speed and accuracy.
"This investment gives us the opportunity to cherry-pick up to 300,000compounds for one specific screening which is not usual for this kind ofinstrumentation," said Thomas Olin, CEO at iNovacia.
The storage modules are designed as stand-alone modular storage systems tofit in any standard laboratory and therefore offer an inert storageenvironment with immediate access to each individual for plating orre-testing samples.
According to TTP LabTech, multiple compound modules are connected inparallel so tubes in different modules can be accessed simultaneously, which means that sample processing gets faster as the library storage grows.
iNovacia was spun out of Biovitrium last March and is now the Nordic region's largest contract-research organisation (CRO) in early drug discovery. The firm offers services to biotech and pharmaceutical companies.
The market for contract research in the pharmaceutical industry is a growing market at an international level.
According to the firm, there is a number of growing pharmaceutical companies in the Nordic region, which gives reasonable expectations for new customers but the firm has already secured assignments from partners outside the Nordic region.
As a further step in the efforts to establish the company on aninternational market, it has entered into alliance with Asinex, an expanding company within the pharmaceutical chemicals sector.
As for the future, iNovacia said that the next six months would be spentconcentrating on getting new contracts in Central Europe and in the USA. "In Switzerland, France and Italy for example there is a hot market for biotechnologies and pharmaceuticals," concluded Olin.