Novilytic inks distribution partnership to take products international
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A bioanalytics startup headquartered in West Lafayette is growing with a recently announced distribution partnership.
Novilytic, which makes products designed to give real-time alerts to pharmaceutical companies if a batch of drugs under development is contaminated, has signed an exclusive distribution deal with Pennsylvania-based Avantor.
“It’s a strategic move,” Novilytic CEO Paul Dreier said. “It’s something that we investigated thoroughly. Avantor is the second largest distributor of laboratory consumables to the pharmaceutical industry in the world.”
Dreier told Inside INdiana Business that the European market is very important to the company’s success.
“About 42% of all the target market resides in the United States. Another 32% resides in the EU and the UK,” he said. “So you grab those together, and they’re wonderful markets for us. It’s great growth. They respect our patents, and it just doubles the opportunity for growth very, very quickly.”
Through the partnership, laboratories in the U.S., European Union, and the United Kingdom will have access to Novilytic’s various Proteometer products immediately.
Novilytic marked the commercial launch of its Proteometer-L product in early 2023, at the same time it announced the opening of a satellite location in Indianapolis.
The system performs analyses of medicinal antibody batches roughly every 10 minutes instead of the traditional manner, which could take several hours.
“Sample preparation has long been a bottleneck in pharmaceutical research. Every time you touch a sample, you risk compromising it,” Robert Fitzgerald, manager of Avantor’s Chromatography portfolio, said in written remarks. “The beauty of Novilytic’s Proteometer is that it removes that step entirely. It’s…a game-changer, and we are thrilled to bring it to our global customer base.”
Since its launch, Novilytic has released a second product, with four more expected to be released later this year, Dreier said. In terms of sales, Dreier said the company expects to see five-fold growth this year compared to 2024.
Because of Avantor’s global presence, Dreier said pharma companies can access Novilytic’s products and have them delivered in quick fashion.
“When you work with a big distributor like this, they have stocking rooms in all the major campuses for the pharma companies. So now our product is readily available,” he said. “All they have to do is walk down or press a button on their computer, and it gets delivered to them automatically.”
Novilytic currently has 14 employees, and Dreier said that number is expected to double by the end of the year.
While the company’s platform is tailored for human-based antibodies, Dreier said it is very adaptable for other uses, and they have already been approached by two pharma companies to work on other potentially lucrative projects, though details of those efforts remain confidential.