Bend Research looking for partners to develop oligonucleotide delivery technologies

Bend Research Inc., a company with more than 30 years of experience in applying innovative pharmaceutical technologies to help clients solve their most difficult scientific and technical problems, is marking the one-year anniversary of a new initiative focused on meeting the needs of a broad range of U.S. and international clients.

In October 2008, Bend Research launched a new marketing effort aimed at expanding the company's client roster and its proprietary service offerings. This expansion drive resulted from Bend Research's near 20-year R&D relationship with Pfizer transitioning, after a decade of exclusivity, into a non-exclusive arrangement.

The result has been a rapid expansion of the company's client portfolio, including more than two dozen pharma and biotech companies.

According to Bend Research CEO Rod Ray, "Our rapid success with the new marketing effort is the result of our long track record of success in solving tough technical problems for clients, as well as broad-ranging expertise and great multi-disciplinary teams."

Ray said Bend Research clients also benefit from the company's flexible business model, which emphasizes close collaboration with customers and client value creation.

New clients have asked Bend Research to solve a variety of development problems spanning the entire drug-discovery and development spectrum during the past year. The tasks range from early-stage drug formulation to advanced cGMP manufacturing of supplies for human clinical trials (Phases 1 through 4).

A major draw for Bend Research's new clients is access to the company's strong portfolio of proprietary and non-proprietary technologies, which can be applied on a case-by-case basis to their specific formulation or production challenges. These include oral solubilization, either alone or in combination with established oral controlled-release technologies, using tablets and multi-particulate dosage forms.

Bend Research also offers advanced engineering capabilities for the scale up and scale down of unit operations such as spray drying, hot melt extrusion, granulation, and tablet or bead coating.

During the past year, Bend Research has invested in further expanding the technology portfolio. The firm's novel technologies include new solubility techniques for oral, ocular, parenteral and pulmonary delivery routes. Additionally, Bend Research is looking for partners wanting to develop advanced technologies such as oligonucleotide delivery.

As one new Bend Research customer from "Big Pharma" explained, "We are extremely pleased that Bend Research is now offering its unique skill sets and best-in-class capabilities to the world beyond Pfizer. When we learned they were available to work with other firms, we quickly took advantage of their availability to help solve some of our most-challenging development problems."

To put his own 25+ years of experience at Bend Research into perspective, CEO Rod Ray summarized his view of the company's past and future: "At Bend Research, we have always welcomed the chance to team up with our customers to tackle their toughest challenges, which we now do exclusively in the pharmaceutical and health-science arena. We have been very encouraged by the broad-based customer response we have had over the past year. We have some exciting projects coming together and are really looking forward to 2010."