Synexa Life Sciences opens international HQ in Dublin
Synexa Life Sciences, a global leader in biomarker services, has announced the opening of its international headquarters in Dublin. The new centre will be home to Synexa’s global business development activities and a new Bioinformatics Lab, and is expected to create up to 30 highly skilled jobs over the next five years.
Welcoming the decision by Synexa to open their international headquarters in Dublin, the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise and Innovation, Frances Fitzgerald said: “This is a great win for Ireland, bringing high quality jobs involving cutting-edge science and research for the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry and will help drive the development of new products by the industry. The presence of Synexa here will bring considerable weight to our growing cluster of companies in a niche area of the life sciences sector and build on our existing expertise. I am confident that the company will be able to source the talent necessary, as a result of the Government’s commitment to pursuing skills availability for our high technology industries”.
Synexa operates biomarker research laboratories in Berlin, London and Cape Town, where the company was founded in 2003 by Irishman Paul O’Riordan (CEO) and two local scientists, Dr. Justin Devine and Prof. Patrick Bouic. Mr O’Riordan qualified as an Irish chartered accountant in 1989, is a member of the Global Irish Network and sees Ireland as the perfect base from which to manage the company’s continued rapid growth.
“Ireland has a well-deserved reputation as one of the world’s most open and business-friendly environments, making the decision to locate our international HQ here very straightforward. The IDA has been extremely welcoming and professional, and Dublin’s rapidly growing ecosystem of high-tech companies, innovative research institutions and skilled young people makes it a very attractive place to build a business like ours,” he said.
Synexa’s new facility will include the creation of a Bioinformatics Lab, in which specialised data analysts and machine learning systems will interrogate the data generated in the company’s biomarker labs. Mr. O’Riordan believes “that that the richness of insight available about a drug’s performance and the ability to identify biomarker-based ‘signatures’ of response and non-response among patients will mean that bioinformatics analysis will become an essential tool for improving the efficiency of new drug development over the next decade.”
Synexa provides biomarker services to the global biotech and pharmaceutical industry. Biomarker analysis helps drug researchers to determine and predict a new drug’s safety and efficacy profile, identify likely patient responders and non-responders, and better understand how the drug works. The global biomarker services industry has been growing very rapidly since 2010, as biopharma companies invest heavily in ‘precision medicine’ solutions – a future in which medical treatment and therapies are tailored to individual patients based on their predicted response or risk of disease.
Commenting on the announcement, Martin Shanahan, CEO of IDA Ireland said: “The decision by Synexa, to locate its International Headquarters in Dublin, marks an important win for Ireland in further developing the pharmaceutical biotechnology sector. The Synexa headquarters will be a welcome addition to the ever expanding life sciences cluster in Ireland and I look forward to working with the company as it continues to grow”.
