In 1984, three doctoral students – Metin Colpan, Karsten Henco and Jürgen Schumacher – founded a company in Düsseldorf with support from their supervisor, 43-year-old biophysicist Detlev Riesner. It was a very unusual step at the time, as West German academia and industry existed so separately it was as if a wall divided them. The four researchers broke down that wall by founding one of the first biotech spin-offs from a German university: Diagen. The name, a combination of “diagnostics” and “genetics”, reflected the founders’ vision: to detect pathogens at a molecular level using simple methods based on their nucleic acids. The breakthrough came in summer 1986, when Colpan invented a two-part, single-use plastic system that made it possible to reliably and affordably extract nucleic acids from plasmids in just a few hours. Previously, research labs had to do this using stainless steel columns, and the process took two to three days.

Colpan’s single-use kits paved the way for the company’s success. By that stage it had changed its name to QIAGEN, employed 20 staff and operated from a production facility that it sublet from the company Henkel. But when QIAGEN diversified too much, it led to a liquidity crisis and the company split in 1993. Henco and Schumacher left to found their own companies. Colpan took over sole leadership of QIAGEN and, with newly recruited economist Peer Schatz, drew up a business plan that focused exclusively on separation technologies, expanded their areas of application and pushed ahead with their automation. In 1996, QIAGEN introduced BioRobot 9600, its first automated lab solution for purifying nucleic acids. Now employing 450 staff and generating US$54 million in turnover, QIAGEN took the bold step of becoming the first German biotech company to list on the US technology index NASDAQ. A year later, in 1997, it listed on the Neuer Markt index (now TecDAX) in Frankfurt, and built prestigious headquarters in Hilden, a town close to Düsseldorf.

QIAGEN soon became the poster child of Germany’s biotechnology sector. But it still wasn’t playing in the premier league internationally. That all changed in 2007 with the multibillion-dollar takeover of Digene, a company based in Maryland, USA, with what at the time was the only approved test for detecting human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer. QIAGEN’s acquisition of Digene made it a global leader in molecular diagnostics. In 2009, its revenue exceeded US$1 billion for the first time. Since then, QIAGEN’s diagnostic solutions have covered all steps from biological sample to the corresponding insights (sample to insight). The automated process extracts, purifies and stabilises nucleic acids and proteins, then measures them and interprets them using bioinformatics.