“We are the partner of the global research community”

When you talk to Marcus Quack, the DACH managing director of Revvity, and ask him what the company, which is only a few months old, actually does, he first has to take a deep breath. The company was previously affiliated with PerkinElmer, whose applied, food and enterprise services were purchased by private equity firm New Mountain Capital for nearly $2.5 billion. The new scientific solutions company Revvity, however, continues to support pharmaceutical and biotech companies as well as diagnostic laboratories, universities and governments under a new name. “Monitor Health Services Research” spoke to Marcus Quack about the company’s rather ambitious goals and a possible link to health services research.

>> Mr. Quack, do you already know Revvity in Germany?
Some of you will have probably already heard that the human health division of Revvity, for which I am responsible in the DACH region, has been renamed since May of this year. However, we also know our own product brands, which we have been introducing for years, as well as the company EUROIMMUN, which is affiliated with us and has its headquarters in Lübeck, which was taken over by PerkinElmer in 2017 and is one of the leading providers of products for diagnosing autoimmune and infectious diseases as well as allergies and for carrying out genetic analyses . At the Hamburg site, high-quality confocal analysis devices and ultra-high-throughput screening systems are developed and manufactured, which are used in particular in the health sciences sector. Incidentally, this branch of the company emerged from Evotec Technologies, which was integrated into the PerkinElmer Group in 2007 and has since strengthened the life sciences division as a “Center of Excellence”. Another business area is viral vector services, from vector technology and production to the development of cell and gene therapies. In this way, we cover the entire continuum from research to development through diagnosis to healing.

So much for the history that started in 1937 with the founding of The Perkin
Elmer Company began to develop optical components by Richard S. Perkin and Charles W. Elmer. What led to the spin-off of the human health division and the renaming to Revvity?
Of course you don't do something like that lightly. And especially not when you have been and are successfully active in over a hundred countries around the world for over 70 years. However, if you look at the development of the last few years, you quickly see that the step towards an ever-increasing diagnostic share of our business areas is more than evident. Against this background, the company has decided, on the one hand, to divide the business areas, which have become very extensive - on the one hand into the Applied, Food and Enterprise Services, which continue to operate under PerkinElmer, and on the other hand the Scientific Solutions division, which has been operating for a few months appears under a new brand name. This is also a sign that we want to do something completely new in the future.

What exactly?
We want to reposition ourselves as a company with products, developments and solutions that we already have and that we will research in the future. So the new brand name makes sense.

Which is intended to be a reminder of their clearly formulated goal of revolutionizing the healthcare system.
The name “Revvity” is based on the words “revolution” and “vita” (Latin for “life”). The-
We will back up this – admittedly very high – standard with solutions and products and thereby show that our statements fit into an overall concept.

At first glance, the linguistic highlights on the new Revvity* homepage read a bit pompous; you might call it sophisticated or self-confident. For example, under the heading “Impossible is Inspiration” it says: “When you say impossible, we say challenge accepted.” The company would “fearlessly face the unknown of tomorrow for a healthier humanity.” The aim is to “expand the boundaries of human potential through science” and address the “world’s greatest health challenges”. The verbal bar is really set high. But do you also jump over it?
With what Revvity does in the future, we will show that we have enough substance and that the verbal highlights you mentioned are not just marketing speak. Of course, we need to make sure that people first recognize Revvity as a brand and appreciate the amount of solutions we can offer. That will be the focus for the next few months or maybe even years. A big advantage of splitting up the divisions is that we can now focus on the specific core markets and can therefore drive our own innovations much better, since all market areas in which we have been and are active for years are developing very dynamically. This is also why I, who can look back on 17 years with the company, can logically understand the strategic decision to separate the company divisions and support it.

Let's get things done. You use words like “health” and claim that your company wants to revolutionize health, which is a truly noble claim. Can your products and solutions really improve health, to the benefit of patients and the system as such?
Based on the fact that the patient and their illness are at the center of our actions, we primarily offer the necessary diagnostics and many tools that are needed to research new approaches for innovative medicines. One example is the Revvity subsidiary EUROIMMUN, which has a whole range of diagnostic procedures for cancer, autoimmune diseases and infection biology in its portfolio. We ourselves have been active in the area of screenings for years; Here, among other things, in the area of newborn screening - we are the global market leader here and can help save the lives of 40 babies every day. Now I could name a whole range of other products, approaches and solutions that add up to a very complex picture of what we offer - from non-invasive prenatal testing for trisomies to viral vectors for mRNA vaccines to cell-based test arrays and digital X-ray detectors for research purposes. Everything is about giving researchers and users in academia and pharmaceutical research exactly the tools they need to answer a specific question and make things visible or representable.

Let's take the university approach. What can you deliver?
For example, cell-based technologies, high-throughput imaging processes and very fast and accurate automatic cell counters including the necessary reagents and consumables. This is something that academia and pharmaceutical companies constantly need in their research development - including multi-omics offerings with an extensive portfolio in the field of genome sequencing. We always make sure that we do not represent individual solutions, but rather an entire workflow.

Health care research is primarily concerned with the question of what reaches patients at the end of the day, but also what new data streams can be generated in order to make health care research even better. Where can you lend a hand to health services research?
We are not a data provider that passes on data outside of our own product development or evaluation studies. However, we are partners with those companies that generate data with our tools. Corona was the prime example of this. It only took us two or three weeks to provide the appropriate test kits for PCR-based corona diagnostics - over 70 million samples were tested with them worldwide. Of course, these were continually adapted over the course of the Corona pandemic so that they were able to detect new variants with high levels of information and accuracy. If a pandemic should come again - which of course no one wants, but is quite likely - we can use the knowledge gained here to react very quickly to new developments and offer appropriate kits and diagnostics. In this sense, we are the partner of all those who use our tools to generate research data and then make it available to the global research community.

Back to your statement: “Revolutionize health”. How is that supposed to work? In effect, you are essentially a sorcerer's apprentice with various solutions in your portfolio that others can use to conduct health-promoting research.
Something like that. We support everyone – whether in academia or in the pharmaceutical and biotech world – in the area of drug development. We see ourselves as a scientific companion with a truly huge toolkit and an enormous range of solutions that can be used to address almost any question. In the last four years we have achieved a lot in this area and have been able to attract many interesting companies, most of which are now fully integrated into Revvity.
Either you develop it yourself or you complete it.
Always what fits better into the corporate strategy and, above all, into the necessary time horizon, which is becoming ever faster due to technology and digitalization as well as AI. Thanks to our long history and long-term market success, we have the capacity to invest the necessary power - made up of competencies and budgets - in the diagnostic markets that are important to us in order to really develop them further. However, the most important key to playing a significant role here is always your own innovative strength. The fact that we can do both – develop and acquire – makes us fit for the future. We see ourselves as a player who not only wants to exist in the diagnostics and life sciences markets for the next few decades, but also wants to help shape them - always according to our motto: embrace the unknown.

Which future markets are in focus?
We clearly see this in the area of applied patient treatment, which is often referred to as personalized medicine. We will increasingly be able to develop therapies and treatment options tailored to each individual. This is always preceded by the appropriate diagnostics, including the necessary cell-based methods to detect genetic constellations. In addition, we have the corresponding imaging procedures and solutions for next-generation sequencing for everything that might come our way.

If you want to look five years into the future, where do you see Revvity?
Much more than we do today, we will work with our customers to develop software solutions tailored to their needs - for data analysis, data handling and, of course, big data. For example, we developed software many years ago that in the future can be designed to display scientific data, from whatever field, in any format that a customer wants, in order to enable super-fast analyses.

Another part of your large portfolio.
So you might understand a bit of my challenge to describe what Revvity is all about. That's why I welcome the fact that the previously much larger portfolio has been focused on the human science area, which allows me to strategically align it in the German-speaking countries for which I am responsible. <<

Mr Quack, thank you for the interview.

The interview was conducted by MVF editor-in-chief Peter Stegmaier.