Headquarters: St. Paul
Founded: 2001
Revenues, 2006: $50 million-plus
Employees: 425
Ticker: Private
Web site: www.apptec-usa.com
What it does: Contract R&D, and custom testing and manufacturing services for biopharmaceuticals, medical devices, cellular therapeutics and tissue-based products



Among contract service providers to the health care industry, AppTec stands alone. Others do work for either the medical device industry or the biopharmaceutical industry, “or they’ll only do testing, or R&D, or manufacturing,” says Bonnie Baskin, AppTec’s founder and CEO. “We are a combination testing and manufacturing service provider . . . . No other company offers the breadth and the scope of what we do.”

AppTec was formed when Baskin sold off the clinical piece of ViroMed, a company she had founded in the pre-AIDS days of 1982 in response to the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the first antiviral drug to treat herpes. Her assumption that doctors would begin testing for the virus now that there was a way to treat it proved correct. As a private diagnostic lab, Baskin says, “we were one of the first to grow viruses for more than research purposes. It was not mainstream clinical diagnostic dogma at that time.”

Baskin’s vision with AppTec was to build a new company based on the testing that ViroMed did for the medical-device and biopharmaceutical industries. “We were very prophetic to be able to see what the landscape of health care products would be as well as the convergence of medical devices and biologics,” says Baskin, whose background includes a PhD in microbiology and postdoctorate work at the National Institutes of Health.

Biologics are drugs made in living cells as opposed to drugs synthesized from chemicals. Baskin recognized that the most commercially successful biologics would be a class called monoclonal antibodies; they’re identical because they are all clones of a single parent cell. Baskin refers to monoclonal antibodies, which are used to treat diseases such as cancer and arthritis, as the “blockbusters of biologics.”

Producing monoclonal antibodies is such a complicated, expensive, and equipment-intensive process that there was an industry-wide manufacturing capacity shortage. Given the significant and growing need for these biologics, Baskin’s direction for AppTec helped the company attract $29 million in venture capital to fund the construction and operation of a 75,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Philadelphia, which was completed in mid-2004.

That facility, together with a testing-only site in Atlanta and the company’s St. Paul headquarters—which also serve as a testing and manufacturing site—has allowed AppTec to expand its services from traditional biologics and medical devices to newer cell therapeutics and biologics-based medical devices.

The stage is set for a bright future. AppTec finally turned a profit in 2006 on 56 percent revenue growth. And with strong sales penetration in the United States, Baskin is gearing up for stronger sales in Europe and Asia. “We’re continuing to experience very significant, dramatic, continuous growth and expansion,” she says. “It continues to be very much an entrepreneurial company.”