LONDON--In an interview with Reuters here earlier this month, Alex Titomirov, president and CEO of the information technology company InforMax, said the firm will soon open sales offices in London and Germany to expand its presence in the European drug-development software market. The US-based company, which opened a Paris office last year, will nearly double its staff to around 70 this year in an effort to compete with such entrenched European players as Oxford Molecular Group and MDL Information Systems, Titomirov revealed.
He said he expects to see sales multiply into the hundreds of millions of dollars within three to four years, from around $3.5 million currently, Reuters reported. At that time, Titomirov said he will take the company public. The executive observed that growth in the German market is particularly healthy within the fast-growing drug discovery software market in Europe. He is considering a sales office in Dusseldorf or Munich, Titomirov said. In France, the company signed a deal in September to provide its Vector NTI software to Rhone-Poulenc Rorer, and is currently in talks with Elf Aquitaine's Sanofi and the French government. Meanwhile, in Britain, Glaxo Wellcome and Zeneca are already customers. Other users include Astra, Pfizer, and DuPont.
"The main reason for our success is that we have employed molecular biologists who know how to program rather than software experts who know molecular biology. That is a different approach that made us leapfrog the competition,'' Titomirov claimed in the interview.