A success story - the journey from inception to innovation

Immerse into the firsthand testimony of our CEO, Jürgen Lünzer , on NGE's evolution into a success story within the life science industry:

"NIPPON Genetics EUROPE GmbH, based in Düren, close to the Belgian and Dutch borders, develops, produces, and markets products for the life sciences, particularly in the field of molecular biology and biochemical analysis. Nippon Genetics operates from two locations - Japan and Germany. The company in Germany was founded almost 20 years ago, while the Japanese parent company has been in place since 1989. The primary goal is to make life easier for scientists all over the world. We aim to optimize innovative products that we develop in Japan and Germany to meet customer needs. We work very closely with universities and research institutes to learn about the challenges scientists face in the laboratory.

The German company was founded in 2004 and the founding story is rather unusual. At the time, I was working for a renowned German company and had acquired the Japanese company as our dealer in Japan. We developed a very good relationship in a very short time and I was fascinated by the Japanese culture from the very beginning. When the opportunity arose to set up our own company in Germany in order to find innovative biotech companies in Europe to represent them in Japan, I didn't have to think twice. A lot has really changed since then. We have developed from a pure trading company into a developer and manufacturer and now sell a very interesting mix of reagents, consumables, and instruments. Our aim is always to replicate a complete experiment in the laboratory with our products.

While the company has achieved numerous milestones, two stand out as significant contributors.

We worked on the development of DNA dyes at a very early stage. Ethidium bromide was rightly the product of choice for a long time, despite all the disadvantages of a toxic and carcinogenic dye. Thanks to our MIDORI dyes, which are now described in more than 2000 scientific publications, we have succeeded in offering safe dyes with the same sensitivity and spreading our product range over several light sources (UV, blue LED, or blue-green LED light). We have a customized solution for every user.

The second, even more important milestone was the development of a safe light source for the visualization of DNA and RNA molecules. For a long time, a UV light source was and still is used, but this is not only dangerous for the user, but also for the nucleic acid, which is so permanently damaged within 30 seconds that subsequent experiments such as cloning and sequencing sometimes lead to very unsatisfactory results. Our technology works with visible light and uses a mixture of blue and green light to excite the fluorescent dyes used to stain DNA and RNA, the Blue/Green LED technology. This has several advantages for the user. They can work with a safe light source, all known dyes can be used and the subsequent experiments show very good performance. Today we are proud to say that more than 3,000 Blue/Green LED instruments have already been installed worldwide. (graph) This is particularly remarkable as we are still a small company and do not have the marketing budget of the big players, but our customers are so enthusiastic about this technology that they are happy to recommend us to colleagues.

However, there are bumps in the road…The development of a company is always associated with ups and downs. In recent years, we have made the transition from a pure service provider to a manufacturing company and Elon Musk is not the only one who has had to realize painful experiences when setting up production. However, we have learned a lot from this and hope to keep getting better - that is what drives us every day.

Many people ask me if I am not very proud of the development of Nippon Genetics and I always reply that I am incredibly proud of my team, because, without these enthusiastic colleagues, none of this would have been possible. It is still a small miracle for me that we still find very qualified and charismatic employees and that they stay with us for a long time. This is perhaps the most difficult task of an entrepreneur when he runs a company that is constantly growing and therefore also constantly needs new staff. The company spirit, which is still that of a small family business, should be preserved in the best possible way.

We have just successfully completed our first large Gel documentation device and really did everything ourselves. From the software development, the UX design, and all the hardware, we have complete control over all the important steps and this has taken a lot of time and energy. However, we were really rewarded for all our efforts, as the feedback from the presentation at two major trade fairs was so positive that we will be taking on new challenges. That's why we plan to develop many new products in 2024 and also present some of them on the market. We are getting very good feedback from two very different markets, the Asian and the European. This helps us a lot in our development and next year we want to deepen our cooperation network with universities and research institutions in Germany.

In the longer term, we will also continue to focus on protein analysis and expand this area. Many of our customers who have been working with DNA and RNA techniques for many years now want to take the step towards protein analysis. We can see the needs here and would also like to develop innovative products in this area that allow our customers to organize their day-to-day laboratory work more efficiently. This means that there will be a lot of new things to learn from us again in 2024. We are already looking forward to sharing new applications, technologies, and products with our customers on various platforms such as LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and X - stay tuned :)"